I don't expect movies to be completely realistic. I like suspending my disbelief for the sake of something looking cool but there are some things that just make no sense. Furthermore, you find that, on top of being completely stupid, these tropes are in every single movie.
The three major ones for me:
Cocking a gun to intimidate someone
So the bad guy has his gun to someone's head, trying to get him to talk. Dude won't talk, so the bad guy cocks his gun. Oooh, dramatic
But think about it. It either means that:
1) The gun wasn't ready to fire before, thus the earlier threats had no real weight behind them, or
2) The gun was ready to fire before, thus the action is completely redundant (it's even sillier when they "pump" a shotgun to show that "shit is going to go down" because that just ejects the shell..a perfectly good shell
So what's the point? I get that there's the intimidation factor, but come on, if the dude isn't already intimidated with a gun in his face, cocking it isn't gonna do much.
Worse than when it's being used to intimidate is when the person had every intention of firing and only waited to cock the gun at the last moment to look cool.
But even if you want to ignore how stupid it is, it's still completely played out. It seems like every movie or TV show that involves guns does it at some point. It may have been dramatic once, but its done to death.
Knocking people unconscious with a hit to the head
Do you know what happens when people get blunt force trauma to the head? The cerebral cortex can become bruised - contused, axonal injury due to stretching can occure, or in the worse case, they can die.
Oh, but not in movie world. Get hit on the head and you just take a nice little nap. Every time, because nobody ever swings hard enough to kill or soft enough to do nothing. And after you wake up, the only lingering health problem is a bit of a headache.
And again, this is something that happens all the time. Often several times in one movie.
Shooting things makes them explode
Mythbusters ruined this one for me.
It doesn't matter if you have a barrel full of gasoline. Shooting it isn't going to make it ignite. A bullet is a small piece of metal going really fast. There is no fire involved past the firing process. It won't ignite anything. Maybe, maybe, there's a slim chance that it could spark and that spark will cause ignition, but that's unlikely at best. You can't shoot something combustible and reliably expect it to explode.
For a long time I have been willing to suspend my disbelief far enough to allow for the big fiery movie explosions over realistic explosions because they're cooler to watch, but the time has come now. I cannot idly watch as commonsense takes a back seat with Hollywood action movies. If it has to be an unrealistic explosion, at least come up with better ways to deliver it.
Yes, I know it makes me a total nerd to be faffing about with trivial things like these, but I don't care. Any time I see any of these three things, it makes my left eye twitch. Oh and don't even get me started with turning every production into 3-fecking-D. Life is already in 3D, if you can't be arsed to put some realism into your explosions then don't add "realism" via 3D and have me fork out more money and spend 120mins wearing goggles that nap on the bridge of my nose.
Are/is there any similar things that you experience in movies that you have gotten irked about?
