f13.net

So look, we have enough metaconversation bubbling up in these threads (and over in TV). Let's see if folks can, without getting hung up on an individual film just yet, set out the boundaries:

1) When is a film just fun and you don't care if it's plausible, realistic, etc.?
2) When or at what moment do you start saying, "Hey, wait a minute." Why?
3) When does "Hey, wait a minute" curdle into nerdrage and displeasure?
4) Is there any film ever dealing with fantasy, speculative or futuristic themes and motifs that has 100% withstood your most brutal skepticism? How come?

You assume these are lines cut into some sort of stone, and not sand.

Number four is the only one, I think, where people can actually give an answer. The first thing that popped into my head was 'Primer' and as for why - because it was a goddamned masterpiece.

I don't like it when a film rubs my nose in its bullshit.  In the thread that got this started, ID4 didn't work for me because there were too many times where the violation of common sense was closely juxtaposed with places where it didn't.  Just as a quick example, it jumped immediately from Goldblum and his dad sailing out of NYC without traffic problems to DC totally locked down in only one direction, and then gave me time to think about how stupid that was.

I can accept completely unrealistic events and framing devices, as long as the movie commits to them and doesn't just toss them out for convenience.  As long as it doesn't make me go 'What the fuck just happened?' while I'm sitting there, I'll wait to pick it apart and just enjoy the ride.

--Dave

It depends how central the suspension of disbelief is to the nature of the film. You want something that takes itself very seriously and tries to build the entertainment on speculative realism then you need a lot more than ID4 personality driven SF war blockbuster. You want a thought experiment like Cube to have good consistent characters and decent performances, but mostly to stick strongly to the guidelines it sets itself. Etc, etc.

No film, of any sort, withstands serious skepticism. There are inconsistent characterizations in dramas, poor performances, bad makeup, continuity goofs, blah blah whatever. That's the nature of the medium. The whole thing is speculative and built upon the willing suspension of disbelief of the viewer.

It's when a film breaks its own rules in an obvious and contradictory way, without doing do deliberately or with purpose that adds something else of significant value, that I get annoyed.

The key is in the term. It's willing suspension of disbelief. I can turn it on or off at will.

If I'm enjoying the film enough then I don't care about it having it's wicked way with the laws of physics. If I'm not enjoying the film then flagrant abuses of intelligence are bundled up into the general dislike.

Whether or not I enjoy a film enough is entirely subjective! Of course it's circular - being written intelligently and not treating your audience like morons adds to the enjoyment.

They are movies for fuck sake. You suspend your disbelief just believing that an actor is a character. All I care about is whether I enjoy the thing or not and it entertains me on the terms that I expect going in (or surprises me in a good way).

This exactly.

I think first up for me is sincerity. I don't care if a movie is silly or serious or 'realistic' or whatever, as long as the people making it give as much of a damn as I do watching it.
Or, at the very least, fake it well enough so I don't notice.  :grin:

And that's why I hate Armegeddon so much. I use the science mistakes to jab at it, but my ire comes from the thing being so cynical. Not the story, but the film.

For fantasy, I really only care if things are internally consistent. For science fiction, I am somewhat pickier, but again internal consistency is more important than checking off real science checkboxes. Honestly it only becomes a problem when the film invites me to dwell on issues like that by either being boring in other ways or just being completely blatant and dumb about it.

Subjective things are subjective. Asking for objectivity defeats the purpose, and derails are what inter-related forum tangents are all about.

Yeah, this is exactly where I stand.  The better or more enjoyable the movie, the more my brain glosses over impossibilities and minor plot holes.  Pacific Rim is a good case of this, where there is a lot about the plot you can shoot holes through when you look at it, but seriously none of that really crossed my mind or bothered me while watching the movie.  The more boring or terrible a film is, then I cannot even stop myself from nit picking every damn thing to add to a giant rolling snowball of hate for it.

Also what Ingmar said.  I'll pretty much run with any premise, no matter how outlandish (ok, except for maybe a world where gun powder just suddenly stops working (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series#United_States_of_America_.28Boise.29).  Thats just fucking stupid).  As long as it remains internally consistent with the rules it setup, I'm fine.  Blatantly breaking your own rules tends to make me hate the story twice as much as I might have normally before, however.

One of my key components in whether or not I really enjoy a movie is the actor/character thing. If I watch a movie and think about the actor playing the role rather than the character in the movie, then I am definitely missing the immersion part of it. For whatever reason, Brad Pitt does this... I see that guy and never think of the character he is playing but that it is Brad Pitt in the movie. He has done some great work in some movies, but it still boils down to Brad Pitt - Brad as Tyler, Brad as Mickey (though this was one that he seemed to fade into character), Brad as David... as Jeffrey... Same with Vin Diesel. I can't see him as any of his characters. He is Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious movies, Riddick movies, etc. Contrast this with Tom Hanks who seems to become his characters at will in most of his movies. Same for the most part with Johnny Depp. Yeah, they have their off movies, but the majority, they become their roles.

This is of course outside of the story and cinematography and score and everything else production-wise in a movie. Just how the actors in the movie can kill it for me.

Part of it for me is whether the film itself is inviting me to think about its internal rules or premises.

World-building fantasy a la Tolkien invites that for me, and films that are trying to work in that domain--to create a comprehensive sense of being in a world that has its own rules, its own logic, its own internal consistency--call up that instinct in me. Del Toro's little gestures in that direction in his films are very dangerous in that sense--if I'm asked to start thinking about things like "the black market economy in kaiju parts" I might start thinking about other things, and then it's hard to beg off on the "this is just dumb fun" excuse.

Films where the speculative premise IS a big part of the story also heighten my expectations for consistency. Primer is a good example of a film that did that and survived the scrutiny it invited. I felt that way about District 9 too. The contrast is to films where the speculative elements are just there for mood and feeling and sensation like The Fifth Element.

Picking up off something over in the Pacific Rim thread, here's two examples I always found interesting:

1) It was really common to make fun of the computer virus in ID4 but less so to make fun of the general ridiculousness of spaceships that size with those capabilities doing something as grubby as blowing up cities so they can, what, steal some minerals? They don't even want our women.

2) Lots of folks remembered saying, "Wait, what?" when Indiana Jones rode on the outside of a submarine that apparently never submerged during a trip across the Mediterranean but not really "Wait, what?" when Indiana Jones got dragged behind a truck and only got kind of sore and bruised.

In both cases, the films really weren't trying to lodge any serious claim to internal consistency or realism, they were both totally dedicated to fun and pulpy cheese--but even when the mood is right, sometimes a single plot element seems to break in to the experience and get people saying, "Oh, come on!"

It depends on the genre and target audience. 

If it is a comedy, I don't give a %@$# about whether it is plausible or sensible.  We're just there to laugh.  If it is for kids, I don't generally watch it and expect that plausability isn't going to be a priority.  If it is a drama above PG (including most sci-fi, fantasy, etc...), I expect them to do it all. 

I expect drama characters to be written so that their reactions to the world around them make sense.  I don't like those moments where a character does something odd just because it sets up a cool special effect.  Why does the victim flee upstairs?  Why does the crowd that just found out the world has been saved hold off their celebration to see if the pilot made it out alive?  Why does the guy that has only seen a girl for 15 minutes think he is in love?  Earn it if you want us to buy it.

I expect the science/magic to be sensible.  I don't need to understand all the details, and I certainly don't need to believe it could 'really happen'.  However, I do need it to make sense.   If there is tech that allows people to teleport cheaply, why isn't it used all the time?  If there is magic that can make food, why are people starving?  If the monster can punch through a wall, why doesn't it kill the main character when it punches him? 

The complaints in both of these cases seem reasonable though.  In ID4, the premise is alien attack.  Ok.  They have huge giant ships that blow up cities.  I can write off all physics behind that because the premise is that they are mysterious aliens with crazy advance tech.  So fine, they can do all sorts of things we can't.  However, they are using crazy unknown alien tech...... which somehow can read Mac/earth programming instructions to its processor and OS.  Also, Goldblum figured out how to command an alien network he's never seen before to do all this.  Now thats just god damned impossible.

In Indy, getting drug in dirt behind a moving for a bit seems like something you could walk away from, depending.  Never happened to me, but its something I think most people see on screen and think 'Ok, that seems plausible', even if it probably would cause more damage in real life.  Guy jumping on top of a submarine that travels across the ocean and defeats its entire purpose by not diving?  Ok, thats fucking wierd.

Though incidently, the shooting script for the movie actually explains it.  The scene was just cut.  Bascially the submarine dove, but he tied himself to the parascope, and let it drag him along till it came up again.  Still pretty unlikely, but I guess the submarine cruising to its destination while remaining at parascope depth to keep watch on things would seem far more plausible on the big screen.   Info taken from here. (http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/11/19/the-mystery-of-indys-sub-ride-solved/)

(http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/comic-panel.jpg)

(http://www.theraider.net/films/raiders/gallery/deleted/raiders_deleted_07.jpg)

Not sure if I can explain this well, but I need realistic interaction between characters.  If the characters and their actions are believable, then I can let go of all the science and enjoy the ride.  If the dialogue, story, and acting don't grip me I'll rip the thing to shreds.

Yeah.  Begins and, indeed, Dark Knight, should have been unbelievable piles of utter wank.  For the first one, only the Microwave emitter really raised an eyebrow and the second one Joker was a little TOOO well planned, but they sold it.

I'm still surprised at how well they did that and how FUCKING BADLY THEY FAILED with the 3rd one.

To be fair, Heath Ledger sold it. Everyone else sucked, except when Morgan Freeman was talking. Because, you know, Morgan Freeman.

Still haven't seen the third one.

Don't.

No intention. I only saw the first one because it was a reboot. I only saw the second one because of Heath Ledger as the Joker. The third one gives me absolutely no reason whatsoever to watch it.

I still say the first 3 questions in the first post are too much a part of a moving goal post.

Major caveat to what I said above:  If the acting sells it, anything goes.  You can have ridiculous science, non-sensical storytelling, and internal inconsistency as long as the acting is so convincing and riveting that I don't notice it. 

You know, like in Alien from LA.

I found watching Anne Hathaway in leather with long hair a pretty good reason to watch, but that was about it.

Instead of watching the movie, I can watch 2-3 hours of ACTUAL porn or just a clip of Anne Hathaway naked over and over.

As such, not even remotely a reason to watch it.

Halle Berry in leather wasn't enough to save Catwoman. 

Schild is correct.

Naked is a different animal, as is porn.  Again we're in to accounting for tastes.

We're not accounting for taste. I can download all the clips of her in leather in 1080p if I wanted to search such a thing. There's no reason to watch movies for the chicks anymore since we can watch the chicks without having to see the movie. Also, "accounting for taste" is not a counterargument for anything.

I'm less willing to forgive ham-fisted deus-ex-machina in a fantasy or sci-fi movie than any other story, for some reason. I guess if you're playing without regards to the rules, throwing that on top of the pile just ticks me off.

IIRC this was a real physical stunt, so to some degree it is by definition realistic. (From what I recall they dug a little trench to keep the guy being dragged in place)

To address the topic more generally, "suspension of disbelief" does not cover things like awful dialogue, characters acting without motivation or in nonsensical ways, etc. It also doesn't cover things introduced for convenience halfway through the movie, like the Earth spinning backwards somehow reversing time.

In fiction you naturally assume that unless otherwise indicated things in the fictional world are the same as in ours. In our world the earth spinning backwards would not reverse time, so there's no reason to believe it would in the world of Superman. In our world Superman doesn't exist but his existence is explicitly part of the premise so that's ok. Personally I don't give a shit about realism in our world, the problem is when things are not realistic even according to the fiction.

Yeah, when you're actually watching a stuntman getting dragged behind a car, who presumably got up and walked away from it, it isn't hard to suspend disbelief at all.

1) Sharknado
2) Sharknado
3) Sharknado
4) Sharktopus

[/quote]


Yeah, Indy was before our current "let the computer do it" days so it was totally physical effects and you knew it was doable.  Though, yes they dug a trench so he didn't go skirting all over the place.


I finally realized something when I saw the film again 2-3 years ago: That this scene has been interpreted wrong for years and it's because it's badly filmed/ a bad way to convey the idea being presented.  It's not that Superman is reversing the spin of the Earth by flying around it, but that since he's going so fast he's traveling back in time and we see the Earth spin backwards as a result.

Dolphicane?

Pfft.

Scorpnado.

I interpreted that superman scene as merusk described.

It was still terrible and made me think, wait, what? Why didn't you do that earlier?

Really?  Even my 9 year-old self (or however old I was when I first saw it) understood that Superman knew what he was doing was absolutely forbidden and the only thing that would make him doing it was the rage of the love of his life getting crushed to death.  He flipped out and did something he shouldn't have.  That is how I have always thought of that scene.

As regards to the OP, yeah, it has to be internally consistant.  I can suspend my disbelief long enough to believe giant alien spaceships might want to attack our cities for nebulous reasons.  I also pretty much accepted the computer virus, because okay, sure, something has to take them down eventually and we all knew it would be something stupid.  Seeing Randy Quaid flying a jet fighter bugged the shit out of me.  So did launching totally ineffective nukes within the atmosphere.  Still, it was a silly movie on an absurd premise to begin with, so I think people complained too much about it.  Same with Transformers movies.  A movie about giant transforming robots from outer space fighting each other and people complained about...too many explosions?  I'm not sure I ever understood.  The best complainst I can think of about those movies was that the robot forms all looked too samey and indistinct from each other.  Next best complaint was the racist twin robots.  Yeah, the stories were stupid and ham-fisted, but guess what?  The whole idea is stupid to begin with, what else are you expecting?

They gave a guy who dusted crops and flew in a war decades ago the most advanced fighter jet in the world and said 'There ya go.'

That was only one of the many, many, many reasons ID4 sucked utter balls.

This thread reminds me of Misery.

Well, in fairness, he didn't get out of the cockadoodie car.

I'm your #1 Fan.  :why_so_serious:

Supe reversing time was originally his solution to the Zod problem in the Donner cuts.

¿Gerbennema?

Supenado!

Supernintendo

This thread got silly.

I agree, although when you really think about it, stopping a human from detonating a nuke (albeit just one out of two) somehow doesn't count as "interfering in human history", which is what he's actually forbidden from doing - while going back in time five minutes to save a single human being does . . .

But, it somehow made sense when you were watching the movie. For me anyway, even at a very young age. You knew Superman was doing something he shouldn't.

Sometimes a film can have problems with the plot and get away with it, avoiding those "wait, what?" moments. For me, it doesn't do any harm at all if you can actually see the author's hand at work a little bit, and you can understand what they're getting at. Superman's father told him never to do something, but now he's gone and broken the rules to save the person he loves - you can see what story they're trying to tell there and it's a nice story, never mind if every bit of the narrative is totally consistent.

My biggest hate: "It makes sense if you read the obscure tie-in novels/comics/whatever". Fuck off with that.

I bet you can't stand Donnie Darko.

If you had to read something to understand a movie - as in the movie is a supplement to a book - then that movie has failed on every level.

The Hunger Games is one of the worst criminal pieces of media in that regard. What a fucking mess.

That would kill shows like "Les Miserable" stone dead then. It doesn't even try to tell the story, if you were not familiar with the story behind it you would be completely lost.

I had fun discussing Donnie Darko with my friends immediately after getting out of the theater and think that trying to make sense of the actual events with no other context is what makes that movie awesome.  The newer director's cut version directly includes the "extra material" that spells it all out and IMO makes it a much weaker movie.

That movie is a massively overrated piece of shit. :(

Schild hates something most of us love, film at 11.

Err, how so?  I've never read one word of the hunger games, and I understood everything going on in the movie...

If I could go back in time and answer that, I would. But I haven't seen it since it was in theaters and I had about 30 minutes of questions to ask directly afterwards. I remember none of them because they weren't important enough to commit to memory (because I didn't actually like the movie). Everyone basically agreed that reading the books was a big deal in that case.

I find that's the case with a lot of these 'hey, let's translate from the books' films of late.

It's rare that they pack it up in such a way that you don't get a better experience if you're a fan already.

Ditto. And then I went and read the book and was double fine with it.

I just assumed the background plot was a direct ripoff of Battle Royale and that made it fine. Except for being a terrible movie completely lacking in tension or believable characters. The only person I could relate to in that movie was Donald Sutherland. The GF tells me this is not the appropriate person to cheer for.

Anyway, to answer the OP, the most important thing for me is characters acting reasonably within the rules of the universe. Movies, even summer blockbusters, are ultimately about growth of, and conflict between, characters. If that makes sense and appears to lead the story, the rest can earn a pass.

If you spend movie 1 developing a tiny nuclear reactor attached to the protagonists chest, and movie 2 developing that reactor to not kill the protagonist, you can't spend movie 3 with the lead guy sucking on a car battery.

Fantasy movies I had no believability issue with off the top of my head....

Star Wars
Tremors
Toy Story
Monsters inc
Goonies
LotR
Spiderman 1, 2, and even 3 was OK from this perspective.
Thor
Harry Potter 1, 2, 3, 5
WallE
Ghostbusters
All the Back to the Futures
Star Trek 2 and 6
Iron Man 1
From Russia with Love, and most of the first 15 bond films.
Batman Begins and Dark Knight

My suspension of belief ends the minute I raise a finger and say "But... why would you...?" about anything in the movie. Movies are a very visceral medium - you need to be able to keep following the movie without stopping to have to think about it (you can analyze it in depth on subsequent viewings). If the movie makes me stop and think about why the characters would do that, or why this thing works like it does when the movie has already established that it doesn't... then the movie has fucked up.

Examples:

Prometheus - Geologist dude who released geomapping dronebots gets lost
Star Trek Into Darkness - Kirk hides the Enterprise in the ocean of a world to hide it from the natives instead of just beaming down from orbit

With summer blockbusters, action movies and superhero movies, there are things you usually can "just go with" that would fall down on closer inspection (like secret identities). If the breaks in credulity interrupt one of those movies with its assumed suspension of belief, it is a really shitty movie.

I think Siskel and Ebert talked about this once--plots that require characters to act unbelievably stupidly are ok once or twice if everything else is working but they invite that questioning moment and if they don't have a way to very quickly draw you back into the action the film has lost its deflector shields.

 :facepalm:

Why are you face-palming? Multiple people have told me not to bother reading Hunger Games if I've read Battle Royale (which I have) and that the latter is simply the better movie in every way imaginable.

And just to elaborate further. We had a discussion in another thread a out how 'messing with probability' is terrible superpower. In narrative terms it is terrible because even if it made any kind of philosophical sense it is impossible to write reasonable decisions for that character. Either it is an open ended power which means the character can use it to solve any problem on a whim (so not doing so appears dumb), or it is a deus ex power with random outcomes which means your story is no longer driven by characters, but by the whim of the author.

Either outcome results in a terrible story.

Just to elaborate even further, you and Margalis agreed that it was a terrible power.  I thought you criteria was arbitrary and not backed up with solid reasoning.  I don't remember anyone else agreeing with you, but that could be selective bias on my part.  My opinion was that blaming the power and not the writers is doing it wrong.  She's a B-list character that no one cares about and everyone uses as a get out of jail free card because they can.  Lazy hacks are lazy hacks.

Suspension of disbelief begins with the type of film that is being advertised.  The audience is expected to understand the rules of the road of a particular film prior to taking their seat.  Barring any overt advertising, the audience will expect "reality".  The film will be allowed to drift from the rules of the road if it serves to surprise or entertain.

Example, Pineapple Express.  Starts as a stoner flick but drifts into comicbook action violence land.  Probably there are a lot of moments where I said, "wait, what?", but allowed it because the execution was so good.  I was too busy laughing to really give a shit that the movie had become very improbable. 

So there's my opinion, suspension of disbelief is not broken if the script stays consistent to the rules of the road for the type of film it is, or the execution of the rules-breaking is done in a way that is entertaining. Seems like it's a pretty standard way to surprise your audience by establishing rules and then breaking them.  Difference between a crap movie and a good movie is whether or not they writer/director get away with it.

Rules of the road for a science fiction move - the writer/director are going to mostly get the science wrong because it's people who like words writing the screen plays and people who like visual narrative directing them, typically neither of these people prioritize science over narrative.  The non-science-loving audience understands this and have already suspended disbelief at the point they sat in the seat (otherwise, why spend the money?).  The science-loving audience tend to be a bit more pathological and show up mentally demanding things from the movie that will not be delivered and get upset that they aren't delivered.  Mostly I avoid that trap by allowing myself to go with the flow, or just not seeing the movie.  Time-travel movies I avoid because it's a crap concept and I know that I will be mentalling rebelling the entire movie - why waste my time and money?

I thought our argument was about ~science~.

Completely agree that if you stick to rules of the film you can do wacky stuff, and in a film context it isn't science that bothers me, its narrative. Science is only relevant if science is how you express the core narrative (IM1 vs IM3).

But I would also contend that it is possible to build such a bad premise that you are hamstrung from the start and have no room to challenge characters or make a good film. Superman is an obvious example.

For me genre doesn't matter. You get no bonus points for giant robots. If Toy Story can include a compelling story based on the internally consistent decision making and  character arc of an imaginary cowboy there really is no excuse for films aimed at nerds who are much more willing to put up with world building back story than a 6 year old.

(sorry for two books in a row, really bored at work right now.)

I was objecting to Margalis (and yourself) claiming that 'probably manipulation was unrealistic' on two points, 1) probably manipulation (or 'reality density field' manipulation) doesn't seem at odds with current hot-topic QM theory, 2) making a witch that uses hexes in a universe where Dr Strange exists doesn't seem unrealistic to me at all.  We ended up spending more time discussing 1).

No argument on Superman, I don't like Superman either.  Example; Super ventriloquism.  Really?  Dude is fucking super strong, virtually invulnerable and you need to give him super ventriloquism?   :facepalm:  Concept is broken, which I why I don't go to Superman flicks because I realize from the start that I won't like them.  I would be interested in 'alien on our planet, doesn't know he/she is an alien, comes with entirely different set of hind-brain level behaviors, needs to find his/her way through life with humans'.  That's an interesting concept as long as not superman.

I think genre matters a bunch.

Musicals.  I hate them.  Breaking out into song in the middle of story seems retarded.  Bollywood and a billion people disagree with me.

Giant Robot flick.  It comes with rules of the road.  The film goer should decide up front whether they are willing to accept those rules or not.  Not liking the rules of the road for a giant robot flick, going anyway, then rushing to a forum to cry about how the movie didn't meet your expectations makes you a bit broken.  I liked Pacific Rim a lot.  Was very entertained.  Got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for, but no more.  Tanker as sword bothered me not even a little even though I know the ship would break apart the moment he grabbed it.  I wondered a bit about why the Australian kid didn't eject (Marshal was dead anyway, according to the plotline), but didn't really worry too much about it because he was the 'tool that had to die', along with Ron Pearlman.  I didn't expect deep characters.  Rules of the road for this type of flick implies cartoony characters, if they exceed expectations in the characters/acting, likely you're going to see dudes in rubber suits.  There is only so much time/money to make a movie.  So, they didn't exceed my expectations, but they met my expectations.  I'd say the scientists were a bit flat, but I lay that at the actor's feet (not both, I thought that statistician did the best he could playing off of the biologist).

Toy Story.  Animation MOVIE about toys sets different expectations because of Disney.  Story must be something that a child can follow and and find entertaining.  An adult going to this movie assumes limited adult themes or complexity.  Because of Disney, there is also an adult expectation that the writer/director will attempt to weave another layer on top that will entertain adults.  Amusing references to more complex behavior or culture.  They execute very well, tell a good story, it's a good movie.  Is it better than Pacific Rim?  Yes.  Does that make Pacific Rim a bad movie?  It depends on where your bar for 'bad' is.  Due to my love of Godzilla and all things giant monster instilled in me as a child, my bar is really damn low for a giant monster flick.  For drama's, the bar is really really high because I tend to find them tedious.

Dunno about the BR book, but the movies were about different things. I'm not gonna hyperbole and yell Totally Different! because it's obvious they have some strong similarities. But the central theme is very different.

Battle Royale, the film was pretty good for the first half, and then it went animu retard in the second half with the dude with the Rambo infinite bullets machine gun, and the goofy hackers subplot.

From the Pacific Rim thread:
I tend to notice a few loose rules.

 First, if something is stupid the movie needs to take it for granted. If it calls attention to something stupid by trying to explain it or making it a major plot point, then the audience is deliberately asked to think. Big mistake. This is where the virus at the end of ID4 falls down. If it were something that happened to get the characters information, that would be one thing... but it's the solution that takes down the unstoppable big bads.

Second, the more distant the stupid is from common experience the less likely it is to be gamebreaking. Inventing a new form of fusion energy using tungsten and liquid helium is probably okay, but doing the same thing with gasoline and peanut butter is not. Similarly, it's okay for elves from Mars to have moral qualms that specifically forbid the sensible resolution to a dangerous situation, possibly even yakuza from Tokyo, but definitely not jews from Los Angeles.

Third: Quality art direction and emotional resonance will obscure almost anything. If the storytelling and cinematic craft suck, nothing is forgiven. If they're spectacular, much is. Inception got a huge pass for being balls-out ridiculous because it was so consistently beautiful, dramatic and engaging.

Inception didn't really get a pass for being ridiculous. Hell, South Park dedicated an entire episode to how stupid it was.

Inception got a pass because the whole fucking film was about dreams.  And you were never sure the whole fucking film wasn't a dream itself.

Yeah, this. Inception was only "stupid" if you didn't buy the premise of the dream technology macguffin from the get go. If you did, there really aren't any rules you could break that meant anything because lol dreams.

Sure sure... now imagine a Syfy original movie of the same basic story. Most of those passes would immediately expire.

Because it's SyFy and the execution would be utter shit - which it most certainly was not on Inception.

Some people just make movies better than others.

Indeed. That's all I was saying. People tend to forgive stupid stuff, even phenomenally stupid stuff, in stories which are well told. To summarize again, folks seem to ignore or forgive stupid things when the filmmakers:
1. Don't ask us to think about the stupid things.
2. Don't defy easily falsifiable everyday experience.
3. Don't otherwise destroy their credibility as filmmakers.

#1 is very important. If you are going to handwave explanations for things, you better be prepared to state as little as possible concrete about that thing or nerds will pick it apart.

I think Khaldun's example of Indy and the submarine is a good illustration. When Dr. Jones is being dragged behind the truck, we basically see the whole thing. Sure it's somewhat unbelievable that a guy could handle all that, but there he is handling it. It's easy to turn off our brains and let Spielberg and his crew show us what actually happened.

With the submarine, however, the movie just cuts to its arrival at the sea cave Nazi base. A cut like that implcitly hands the audience an opportunity to fill in the blanks... and they couldn't do it. We saw Indy on top of the sub, and now he's quietly crawling out of the water. Did the sub just never submerge? Can he hold his breath for several hours? Was the cave only a few minutes away? Thinking killed it.

Thank you for this thread! Missed it last night.

Yea this. In fact, I wondered why they needed the virus at all. If Goldblum assumed the mother ship would tractor beam them in, they only needed to ferry the nuke to get there. They didn't even assume the virus would propogate across the whole network. I'm still not sure it was the virus that took out the shields or the destruction of the home node that powered everything. They could have cut all of that. But then, they'd have cut a main reason to have a prominent nerd lead maybe. Narrative wins again!

Kinda. But what set me off about Pacific Rim is precisely this. That was a gorgeous movie with a dumbfuck premise I can't get past the moment I allow myself to start thinking about it. But Inception worked for me as a premise and it was pretty, so that's ok.

To the original questions:
1. If it tries to explain anything and I don't find the explanation plausible even within the narrow context of the movie, that leads to #2. Normally I'm ok with stupiddumb if the movie asks me to just assume things are the way they are. Lightsabers and the Force just are. Midichlorians explain it too much.
2. When the explanation is so stupid you need to force yourself to unthink it to enjoy it. Back to the Future was a fun series, but that was some real dumb use of even stock linear time travel.
3. Direct relationship between the level of dumb and the amount of explanation behind it.
4. Star Wars original trilogy (we just assume a whole bunch of the premise without explanation), Star Trek II and III (because it had trek-style sci-fi that tied back to the series you were asked to inherit), Lord of the Rings (because it's specifically a moment in time within a much larger world that was conveyed well in the books and in the movies. You just assumed all the rules were established because shit be looking old even when it was new).

Midichlorians are a great example of a nonsense explanation hurting a film. "The force is magic" is much better than "the force is science" followed by a bunch of stupid shit that definitely isn't science.

Edit: Regarding ID4, a large part of the problem with the ending (and the rest of the movie) is the abrupt tonal changes and the presentation. IIRC the virus has a cartoony flashing skull icon or something...the movie really didn't take it's own ending seriously. The ending was stupid but it was kind of stupid on purpose, in a way that didn't really work.

Edit2: ID4 has a lot of tonal problems - tons of people die, there are serious scenes, a sort of weird retrograde "always listen to the man he knows what's best" morality tale, then "Welcome to Earf, a computer virus with a silly animated gif, extremely hammy acting and broad characters...it's not a serious movie with scenes of levity, it's half serious movie and half really dumb extravaganza. To me neither half works because of the existence of the other half.

There were a lot more reasons it was stupid. I am surprised that so many of you liked it, given the hate here for Lindelof.

Otherwise: Some good points have been made in the last page.

I'd say it's related to what others have expressed here: It is better to be vague than specific, because you will lose out on specifics to anyone whose understanding betters the presentation. When you go into specifics you either have to get it 'right' or risk losing your audience. Doing it 'right' is fucking hard - for a number of reasons. The trick of storytelling is suggesting a reality and letting the audience take you up on it, not telling them what it is.

It's why Agatha Christie most other mystery authors didn't/don't write solvable stories. You need to drive a narrative, not provide solutions.

IE: It's more important in the Matrix that Keanu is able to give an impression of martial arts skill and athleticism than the ability to act, as the former is much more central to the success of the film. While martial arts experts might come away going 'oh well, he was poor but gave it a shot' it would have completely ruined the movie if he couldn't even hold a pose.

/incoherence

What does Lindelof have to do with Inception?

Personally, as long as a movie follows it's own rules I usually buy in. It's when it starts changing things when it's convenient to the poorly written plot that I get annoyed. Good writing and acting can hide a lot of unbelievable things.

I struggled with inception in believability terms, I could accept the dream invasion stuff, but the attempt to solve a business problem through inception seemed dumb. You could reconcile it all to 'maybe its all a dream' but not until later in the film.

That said....

As a piece of art it was good enough that it just didn't need believability any longer. Like a good play, you can transcend the whole 'making practical sense' thing if the film is interesting enough without having to worry about the plot. Summer blockbusters, which generally have nothing except a plot, don't get to do that because they force your attention onto the most prosaic aspects of pure story.

Something shallow that passes itself off as deep and meaningful.

Actually, I prefer Lindelof 9 times out of 10. The stupid in Prometheus was much easier to deal with/ignore.

Midichlorians are a beautiful example of the principle a couple of you have described. It's kind of like how I tell my students that when you stumble a bit in presentation, do NOT go back and correct yourself unless it's a mistake so big that everyone will be unable to focus on anything else. Generally correcting just makes it into a big deal and breaks your rhythm. When a film decides it needs to tell me a lot about something fantastic or unreal in a way that does not blend into or drive the action or characters (or actively contradicts the mood set elsewhere), then it poisons everything else that's going to follow.

You can buy the weird interrogation system Deckard uses to find replicants. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense but it's just underexplained enough to work in establishing setting and then it's used in smart, crucial, lightly explained ways to drive the dramatic action of Blade Runner forward.

You not only can't buy midichlorians--it's worse than that, because if you bother to take the concept even remotely seriously it changes everything about the Star Wars universe for the worse: it means that Jedi are a hereditary caste of mutants, not a meritocratic order of wizards whose power is something of a mystery to themselves as well as others. But nothing else in the stories or the setting seems to even remotely suggest this--so now you lose not just that one moment but almost everything. As you're watching you have a choice--are you just going to forget that happened or are you going to pay attention to it? Neither of which bodes well for the ability to enjoy the rest of the movie, even if the rest of it didn't suck donkey balls.

Exactly. I really didn't want to dredge up the nerdrage Episode I created and which I sorta am glad preceded the existence of F13 (afaik?), but that's really the thing I hated most about that movie. And because it was never ever again mentioned ever, I assume they got the message and realized that throwing in the creatures just so they could use that stupid scanner was just dumb. The steampunk-esque force-detector device Luke resurrected from old Empire archives in the first Timothy Zahn book was much better at it, but even that assumes the narrative even required a force detector at all, which any half-asleep drunk writer would tell you it did not.

Anywhoo, the Matrix is a good example of something that worked, until they had to retcon it because of what I assume was business pressure to take a one off movie into a franchise. Interesting point about the martial arts bit. I always felt that was kind of exposition for the sake of. I mean really, with all the tech they could bring, the fighting felt like knives to a gunfight stuff. I think I read some deep analysis about the martial art sensibilities somewhere, but that all felt like neckbeard stuff. What I saw on screen was that old GAP commercial with some Mortal Kombat footage. And I was fine with that, as long as I don't think too much about it.

That it went into a 2nd and 3rd is why I'm so very glad there was never a sequel to Fifth Element, which also held together very well because it was just a normal action/heroes flick with fun use of sci fi elements, not entirely unlike Star Wars on that premise, though of course a different movie.

I'm not a huge Matrix fan, but the first was well done. And the martial arts was central to the film in many ways. Most obviously it demonstrated the capacity of a character (Neo) to change and demonstrate expertise in something that was beyond the understanding of most of the audience in specifics, but was nonetheless still comprehensible. Which meant it stood in for for all the 'magic' crap he did, without the movie having to go into some sort of nerdrage inducing 'explanation' of how the world technically worked. Trying to do the latter would have buggered up a lot of things. Making him get good at fighting and then gain a mystical epiphany was much more comprehensible and narratively elegant.

Also more fun to watch.

I had never thought of the submarine thing until people brought it up on the internet. Decades later.

I never really got the issue with that. Maybe the submarine didn't submerge. Maybe some guy came up out of the hatch and Jones knocked him out and climbed inside.

Old-timey submarines were safer surfaced (in terms of operational safety, not attack) and had to surface to recharge batteries fairly often. They may have been faster surfaced as well. The idea of a submarine not submerging seems plausible enough.

While midichlorians were in fact stupid, it had always seemed to me like the Force and Jedi were hereditary; after all, it seemed like the entire story was set up that Luke and Leia were force-sensitive because their father was a Jedi.  Just from the original trilogy, I would find it difficult to believe if you try to tell me that the Force is not hereditary.  Especially after Yoda says that there is another, and then we learn he was talking about Leia, because she's Luke's sister.  I certainly never questioned the concept that being a Jedi was something you inherited, back when I watched the original trilogy.

See, I always thought that this is what made Luke and Leia so unusual and why Obi-Wan and Yoda were focused on them. It just felt to me like the Jedi should be a bunch of totally unrelated people for the most part and that the power was something you earned through training and discipline (and yes, some kind of affinity) rather than just being born with it. For the most part, that's actually what we see even in the prequels *except* for the horrible, horrible midichlorian scene. But in a way, Star Wars was better off (re: this thread) not trying to do too much world-building about the Jedi anyway--just set up the basics and go from there. I think that's kind of true for wizards who aren't the main protagonist in any fantasy narrative--only spend a lot of time building up "how magic works in this film/universe" if all the main characters are magicians and the mechanics of magic are crucial to the plot. Dragonslayer, for example, needed to do a bit of work with "how magic works" because that was important to its plot.

Midichlorians were always the answer reason.  Lucas notes from 1977 which were published in the Making of Star Wars book that came out a few years back have notes on the idea.  He didn't have the time to explain it in the original trilogy.  The reason you don't see lots of kids of Jedi running around is because Jedi generally weren't having kids - being Jedi and all.  

I have no idea why I'm bothering engaging in this train wreck of a discussion.

edit: Also I feel compelled to clarify that midichlorians are not the magic itself, but give certain people the ability to access the magic.

If that is true that Lukas success basically stems from being lucky enough not to have enough time and budget to implement his crap. :uhrr:

Well, I think we pretty much all knew that from how the prequels turned out when time and money were not an option, regardless of this one particular issue.  :why_so_serious:

I love this post. Fact and embarassment for knowing and for being compelled for revealing  :grin:

The as-yet unmentioned additional issue with midichlorians is that nothing in the EU material from the 70s through ep 1 said anything about it. Yes, I get canon vs EU. But ya gotta remember the EU stuff wasn't all, nor even mostly, independent fanfic. These were licensed executions that went through a licensing approvals process. Either the notes you mention never got out to the general rank and file employee, or it did but was never enforced for whatever reason.

So you have a bad idea made worse by reveal 20 years into a franchise that had never mentioned any of it.

I imagine we'd all be fine with it had it been part of the original movies though, since we were all kids and not jaded by change for the sake of change. And neckbeards.

True. U-boats were much faster on the surface. They were more boats that could submerge to hide than true submarines. U-boat commanders early in in WWII would often remain on the surface even while attacking to take advantage of their speed, albeit under the cover of night. It's plausible they stayed on the surface the entire time since it was peace time and there would be no reason to submerge.

I was always much more concerned about how Indie didn't have a heat stroke or at least end up with a bad sunburn. :grin:  

Really though, I just always assumed he found a way to stow away for the journey. They can probably hear him walking around up there.

One of the things that you see time and time again on these boards is that most of us have a mighty will to make something make sense--if we want to. Which is maybe one of the distinguishing things about geek culture's approach to films and TV. But we're not all willed to make the same things make sense, or to make them make sense in the same kinds of ways.