Is there something that movie directors and/or writers do all the time that just drives you nuts because it’s not realistic? For example, I have a friend/co-worker from Texas that goes bonkers when he sees actors in a movie hold their gun sideways. Wanted almost put him in the mental hospital.
For me it’s horses. Every movie you see that has horses in it have them neighing every 0.5 microseconds. Horses are never that loud. Matter of fact, they are very silent animals. I have owned horses since I was 8 and I haven’t heard my current horses neigh in months, maybe even a year (or more.)
Horses only neigh when they have something to say. Someone beating a horse doesn’t cause them to neigh. The most they’ll do is grunt. Someone riding them, stopping them, making them run faster, etc. are not neigh triggers either.
If I take my gelding and put him some where my mare can’t see him, she’s going to neigh to find him and he will do the same. If someone riding a horse comes close to my pasture, my horses will neigh to greet the new horse.
I never could figure out why Hollywood does this.
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It’s a discreet form of anthropomorphizing. They do it with most animals. (I hope I don’t ruin animals in general for you by pointing that out xD) The goal is to make them behave slightly more like a human by giving the audience the impression that if it weren’t for a language barrier they’d be communicating with us just like a human would. I’m sure it’s very popular with kids who might like to dream about such a thing.
That being said, I can think of a few for myself:
Multiverse theory: So often invoked, so often poorly executed. Very few movies actually take you to other worlds and make a spectacle out of how different they can be. Very often the other multiverse you visit is almost exactly like the one you’re in with just a few differences. Realistically speaking, with infinite possibilities at play, it would be very difficult to randomly come across a world that similar to your own. It often comes off very lazy and contrived.
Time Travel: The rules of most time travel movies are incoherent, arbitrary, and self-contradictory. And some of the fixes for these common contradictions is invoking a new multiverse where things happened differently. And at that point, it’s not technically a time travel movie anymore because under the hood what you’re actually doing is creating a new universe to live in. Which is bonkers and usually not regarded as the “You are effectively God” power that it really should be contextually. Like how are you going to tell me you can MacGyver a universe into existence but you can’t talk to yourself in that universe? Very contrived. I’d rather see a movie where time travel doesn’t have rules and things can just get crazy and chaotic.
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People falling from insane heights with no broken bones or you know, death
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Like the sideways gun thing, the sideways bow thing really ticks me off. Plus, after seeing “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” (yep, I’m that old) and Lars Andersen’s videos on the Youtubes, it irks me when movie archers draw one arrow from an awkwardly placed quiver and shoot, draw another arrow and shoot, over and over again.
Heroes who are impossible to hit, for example, Lara Croft in the 2001 “Tomb Raider” where she’s suspended in a harness and bounding around in an all-too-predictable pattern while thugs with automatic weapons are spraying bullets everywhere. Or, for that matter, any gun kata scene in Equilibrium. I don’t care how quick and how well-trained you are - you’re not getting out of those situations alive.
On a similar note, “rabbit punch” martial arts, where two people throw rapid flurries of jabs and kicks at each other with almost no discernible effect until one of them randomly falls over dead because of reasons.
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Maybe not quite in the vein of the thread, but I constantly see a variant of this now and it aggravates me to no end. Takes me out of the show entirely, to the point when it happens I start hoping the characters die horribly.
The guy/gal is fighting for their life (maybe also the life of a loved one) against an extremely dangerous, competent, and tenacious killer. Often the killer has already demonstrated an unusual capacity to both inflict and absorb excessive amounts of brutality, punishment, and pain.
Just as things look their worst, the good guy/gal (or other good character) acquires a weapon and saves the day by striking down the killer with a blow to the head, or a stab into the chest or back, or a shot fired into the torso.
And then they drop the weapon and just run away. Sometimes they stand there talking with their backs to the downed killed before leaving. But what they don’t do is go over and use that weapon to make absolutely sure that killer is never, ever getting back up.
And then, of course, they or someone else or maybe everyone else ends up dead.
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I can see that you are describing cliches, but my biggest pet peeves would be movie tropes. Tropes could be cliches, themes, setting, and narratives.
For me, my biggest issue is the disgruntled colonialist story. Way too many movies use this trope, like Avatar, Ferngully, Lawrence of Arabia, Dances With Wolves, and Pochahontas. Though out of the 5, I liked Lawrence, DWD, and Pochahontas a lot. I grew up watching Pochahontas as a kid and I held it dear to me. I recently saw DWD, and I enjoyed it. I haven’t seen Lawrence yet, but I can tell I’m gonna enjoy it when I see it.
Anyhow, for Ferngully and Avatar, those two movies are the ones that I didn’t like. To me it is the usual story of a white guy who is sent to interact with the natives to win their hearts and minds, then falls in love with a native girl, and then decides to defect from his nation of birth to assimilate with the native people. And this leads to a conflict between his kinsman and new friends. He decides that he belongs to the native peoples, and shuns his fellow kinsman. With the exceptions to the movies I liked that used this trope, I really don’t like it because it is repetitive and doesn’t use much innovation.
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A funny one is most sci-fi alien invasions, the aliens have to be soooo cruel and beyond reprehensible in action, inorder to make the human species look good.
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It’s all the trailers now starting out with that one singular piano key.
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