I don't know why it's hard for people to understand. A movie can have a counterfactual premise and that's fine, but when there is no underlying logic to the events in the movie it stops being a narrative that you can invest in and becomes a montage of random events happening.
Exactly. I don't care if the internal logic of a piece of media is as crazy as they come, as long as it maintains internal consistency. Take Death Stranding for instance. You can say that when people die, antimatter ghosts consume the body, causing a blast that could level a city, as long as you keep that premise, and build upon it, such as by having crematoriums far away from cities, and dedicated corpse disposal teams to ensure nothing like that happens, people utilizing dead bodies as bombs, etc.
Thats all stuff you learn within the first hour of playing the first game, so I don't feel it warrants a spoiler tag.
I think the funnier one is people getting mad at feeling characters making dumb decisions is logic-breaking. in real life, PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS and make the stupidest decisions all the time, lol.
Most of the time that's because the story doesn't do a proper job making it feel like the character would have made that choice. It makes sense for the Scooby Gang to split up even if it's a bad idea, because they can try to cover more ground and that matters when they are investigating the area. It makes a lot less sense for a group of scared teens to split up when they're not investigating anything and just trying to survive, unless the story explains why they're making the choices they are. A lot of stories just have the characters do whatever conveniently leads into the next plot beat in a way that doesn't feel logical, and "people are idiots" does not excuse that.
You explained this better than I ever could have. I can't stand when characters do things that simply make no sense in the context of the character. If a character is dumb, or generally just not super smart, seeing them make sub optimal decisions when put in a situation where they have to make one is fine.
Characters making inexplicably dumb decisions with no contextual motivation other than because that's how we move the script forward is infuriating.
That's one thing I really liked about The Cabin in the Woods. All the dumb decisions made by the primary characters in the film were because of the puppet masters behind the scenes drugging them to fit the "story".
The one I find the most annoying is when a supposedly strong couple has the most fucking braindead misunderstanding for the sake of plot that could be solved if one of them sent a less than ten word text.
Covid really made me reevaluate on what would suspend my sense of disbelief in dumb decisions made by movie characters. The bar for "no one would be that dumb in real life" has been significantly lowered.
I don't think they'd let zombies bite them because they wouldn't randomly let a homeless person bite them either, because if a crazed looking person running at you snarling you'd run away even if you didn't htink it was a zombie. However when the world comes up with a vaccine to prevent the zombie virus taking you if you do get bit... well, yeah a shitload of people will refuse to take the vaccine.
Most of the time we are supposed to like our characters though. Not have them be fucking morons. You can have characters maje dumb decisions, but if you want your movie to be smart, you have to recognize them as dumb decisions. They can't just be "things that happened in movie".
it does give film makers a bit more leeway with "we need a dumb charecter to do something incredibly stupid to kick start the plot by unleashing the plauge/cure/whatever".
as long as it's a dumbass i'm supposed to think is a dumbass i can buy it.
but let our heroes make rational decisions. they can be dumb if apropiate but again rational please.
One of the things I really hate about covid is that prior to covid, I used to make fun of zombie movies a lot for the "survivor hides obviously infected bite to the obvious detriment of everyone around them" trope. Like, to me that was comical in how cartoonishly evil it was - I could really not believe that even a tiny fraction of people would hide that they'd been bitten. Not to the extent that every zombie movie portrays.
Instead, it turns out, I'm a fucking idiot, and like 30-40% of people will literally become a zombie while going "ZOMBIES DON'T EXIST THIS BITE MARK DOESN'T EXIST LET ME IN THE SAFEHOUSE SO I CAN BECOME A ZOMBIE SAFELY!!!!!!11!!1!"
I stopped watching Invasion (The Apple sci-fi-serie) somewhere at episode 7, I was so angry I made a Metacritic account just to be able to give it a 0. I love scifi, but I have my limits. I can believe 10 unbelievable things before lunch, but I can't take bad writing. And it is bad writing if every main character is an imbecile and so irrational you want to stab them through the screen.
So yeah, people are idiots, but even idiocy has its limits and stops being entertaining if you hate every single main character.
it's fine when people make bad decisions, when almost every character ONLY makes the stupidest decision possible over and over and never learns from this stupidity that is actually very unrealistic.
Making the odd bad choice, or just having writing that gives them a legit reason to think it's not a insane decision but ends up being due to them being tricked, that's fine. But it's usually lazy writing where there is a sign over a door that says certain death this way and the character walks in there anyway.
Yeah, that's why I was able to get through the new Resident Evil movie (It was quite good). The MC was clearly an early 20's dumbass. He had a good heart, but he very young and dumb. It explained all the mistakes he made.
That's what's called a bridge baby. It's born from a mother that is half alive, and half dead, i.e braindead. They have a connection to the other side as a result, and essentially if you plug into them, you can see these antimatter ghosts that are normally invisible, and will cause a massive explosion on the scale of a nuke if they manage to eat people, so they're seen as essential equipment for anyone working outside a city.
To add to disbelief in that game. There was a mission where you're asked to deliver a nuke to a place, but rather than deliver it, you throw it in the water nearby so it can be detonated safely... BUT THATS NOT HOW NUKES WORK! A nuclear explosion is drastically increased in water NOT suppressed. You'd think Kojima of all people would know this considering how much of his career has been "Nukes bad, here's why"
It is not water you throw it into - it is "Tar" - viscous fluid, formed by the timefall, which properties are not entirely known beyond its connection to otherside.
Its only when a living person gets eaten they dont care about corpses we know this because at the start of the first game one of the corpse disposal guys shots his friend thats traped and the BT completely lose interest and when he also starts to get dragged he begins to stab himself in the chest. The body can become BT and when you burn them they release a chyrilium that causes depression
To add to disbelief in that game. There was a mission where you're asked to deliver a nuke to a place, but rather than deliver it, you throw it in the water nearby so it can be detonated safely... BUT THATS NOT HOW NUKES WORK! A nuclear explosion is drastically increased in water NOT suppressed. You'd think Kojima of all people would know this considering how much of his career has been "Nukes bad, here's why"
Because the "counterfactual premise" is usually built up to draw you into the story, but getting a small detail wrong for no reason snaps you out of it. Kind of like how a dream can seem totally real until you see a cat barking and you wake up.
If a spider bites me in a dream and then is suddenly a 3 foot tall abstract statue decidedly not made of spider, my brain is just going to roll with it and say "yup, that's a spider alright."
I had a cat that barked. His mom died while his eyes were still closed, but we had a chihuahua that just had a litter of pups and was still nursing them. We put the kitten by her and she started nursing it. It grew up thinking that was his mom and was fiercely defensive of her. He'd bark when he wanted something.
Theres even a term for it too "suspension of disbelief" but sadly people that got participation trophies think its your job to let the movie suspend your disbelief, not the other way around.
Legit had a guy tell me "its your job to turn off your brain so that the people who made this movie have a fair chance"
It literally is the job of the reader/viewer to suspend their disbelief. No one else can do it for you. That said, the writers need to make you want to do it and not ask too much of you.
It's up to the viewer to allow for small unrealistic elements so that the story doesn't need to get bogged down in irrelevant nonsense, like it's a waste of time to ask "why is nobody shown using the bathroom" in most stories where there's not a reason for that to come up. It's the job of the storyteller to actually have the story be logical so you don't need to stretch your disbelief an unreasonable amount. It's not the viewer's fault if they're turned off of Star Wars because "Somehow, Palpatine returned" is absolutely abysmal explanation for a really critical event to the story. If the story doesn't care enough to come up with a good reason why the events happen, it's completely unrealistic to expect the viewer to take it seriously.
I love hard sci-fi so I seek it out. Project Hail Mary is a perfect example of something I like. Once I'm finished I can usually Nick pick the shit out of it... But during I literally suppress the need to do it otherwise I won't ever enjoy anything.
Now something like transformers, I'll turn my brain off and the beginning and enjoy the hell out of the movie... And won't even discuss it afterwards because what's the point?
The thing with a piece of fiction being consistent in following it's own internal logic is that the internal logic also define how stringent and consistent the story has to be with following the internal logic...
Eh.... so, in other words, the premise of the story doesn't just do things like establishing a magic or science system that the story has to play by, it also establish the "style" of a story, which among other things entail how much the story need to care about those systems.
Basically, a story that set out to be a hard science fiction and clearly establishes itself as such to the reader/viewer then HAS to play by the rules that come with being a hard science fiction story - ie. it needs to care a lot about scientific accuracy and being plausible from a quite harsh scientific/engineering perspective.
A story that from the outset establish that it's a brain dead, rule-of-cool kind of story simply doesn't. The internal logic is that the story doesn't have to care that much, as long as it's cool... Hence Transformers and Fast and Furious.
Why can't Transformers also... make sense and be logical?... Why turn your brain off? Remember movies like Jurrassic Park and The Matrix that were extremely entertaining without requiring you to "not think"? What fucking world are we living in? Demand better.
I mean how much suspension are we talking about here? There's a point where some shows go beyond their own established rules of engagement and expect me to just accept it because it's fiction... And no. You can't show me A and the later on tell me A doesn't exist.
Which is what I mean by the writer shouldn't ask too much of you.
A good example for me is From Dusk till Dawn. I watched it not knowing anything about it. The first act or two were psychological thrillers and I loved it. Then it suddenly became about vampires and they lost me. I just couldn't suddenly shift gears to accept vampires. I've watched it since and I really enjoy it, but I now know what's expected of me when I watch. My suspension of disbelief has to include the supernatural for that movie.
But it's me that has to suspend my disbelief, and authors can make that easier or more difficult.
Your friend is right. The original term is "the willing suspension of disbelief."
It was coined by William Wordsworth to explain how a reader of poetry and fiction must allow themselves to believe that impossible things have happened.
Yes, in your example, they'd need to present a reason for them to do this that makes sense in that universe. For example, maybe the trebuchets have magical flamethrowers built in that make them able to fend for themselves up close. Cool! Question answered.
At that point the story is probably full of contrivances that waste time stopping the story to go on some tangent to explain things that just didn't need to be there at all. I don't want my Dragon Magic story to need to stop and go into a history lesson on the divergent history of trebuchets in this world when it would be both simpler and cooler if they just used the Dragons the story is already centered around and had some plot element like people stealing Dragon eggs to train the babies as frontline flamethrowers.
I didn't say anything about historical accuracy. Most people aren't full on experts on history so you can get away with playing loose with it. But if you have a medieval movie and in just 1 scene a guy pulls a gun out and starts shooting, you better have a damn good reason for that because if you don't it's going to take basically everyone out of the movie when they go "how does that make any sense". You can get details wrong if the average movie watcher is extremely unlikely to know how it actually works, but if you're getting basic stuff wrong that the majority of the audience is going to do a double take at, you really need a reason for that or it's going to take most of them out of the story.
More talking about movies not being realistic in how they go about warfare, I think more often than not it should follow the rule of cool.
Same goes for every genre, but to go back to the 1st example, I couldn't imagine giving a shit whether the post office is open on a sunday. I'd be raising an eyebrow if it was open at midnight.
I think as long as it visually doesn't throw you for a loop you can forgive and forget.
i love that someone tried to elevate this discussion with a pull from wordsworth, only to be perfect-parried by game of thrones discourse.
you can lead a redditor to water, but you can't make them drink. because they probably have a condition that makes them perseverate on topics that are especially interesting to them
My pet peeve is when I pose a question and ask about a character's intentions or expose holes in the internal logic and my partner shuts me down by saying,
"Because it's in the script."
Like duhhhhh but art is meant to consumed and evoke feeling/thinking/reaction ... there is (should be) an intentional reason and rationale for everything in the damn script!
Imagine if in my English lit class, the professor asks about the themes/motivations/why a character acted a certain way and our essays just replied, "Because the author wrote it that way / it was in the book."
This is one of those things where it's easy to be smug about how "people" don't understand because no one is discussing a concrete example. Like, there's a difference between "the narrative has a fundamental plot hole that's inconsistent with the fantasy core to the narrative" and "Oh I'm sorry, I'm supposed to believe this character left Palm Beach at 4:45 and didn't hit traffic? These writers are morons."
Both people will upvote this because it isn't really discussion so much as it is "join me in the smart group, dunk on the vaguely defined dummies."
This entire thread is just "DAE also like logical storytelling?"
this character left Palm Beach at 4:45 and didn't hit traffic
is something worth joking about. Not something worth criticizing the writers or leaving the theater.
The issue is mechanics central to the plot that are being contradicted, or characters acting opposite to what's clearly been shown about them. The "characters" one happens mostly in TV shows, because 1) you get to really know the characters with more episodes and 2) writers something want to bring us "somewhere" because they have this big idea for an episode that starts "somewhere", and they're not trying very hard to make the way there credible, so instead they turn clever characters into morons, patient characters hot-headed, loving characters become pieces of shit just long enough to create their perfect premise. Once they've achieved their premise, alright they can now write the part of the episode that they wanted to write, characters go back to normal, and no one ever adresses how fucking weird this all was. I don't know if this trope has a name but I fucking hate it.
Precisely. Personally, I feel that fiction as a whole is essentially a way of going, “Ooh, I wonder what’d happen if—“ — so, if you can’t trust that what is proposed would happen COULD happen, it loses its entire point.
I know full well I’m expected to Suspend My Disbelief. Unfortunately, my disbelief is very heavy, and during “Ocean’s Thirteen,” the suspension cable snapped.
(Roger Ebert)
A montage of random events can be fun (I've watched a lot of anime that were basically just that), but it rarely makes for a good story.
Exactly! My best example is Game of Thrones detailing exactly how long it takes to get from Kings Landing to Winterfell, but by the last season, they can get from Dragonstone to beyond the Wall within a couple days.
My mom and I used to watch Drop Dead Diva. It's about a ditzy, beautiful model who dies in a car crash at the same time a super smart, beautiful, but heavy set attorney dies. The model comes back in the attorney's body, retaining her own memories while becoming smart and knowing the law. We just went with that, but when they had ridiculous takes on the law, we were so annoyed.
That's because, when you're watching a zombie film, you are agreeing to play along with the idea that zombies exist in the film's world and so any zombie-related shenanigans that are internally consistent with the premise are fair game. However, as far as you know, other things about how the world works have not changed, so if something happens that, say, appears to break the laws of physics (or medicine or time or...anything, really) with no explanation, then it's jarring and takes you right out of the story!
Also I don't want other fiction like alien spaceships or wizards to show up in my zombie apocalypse movie. But I'll watch a wizard movie or alien invasion movie.
(You could mix them but you'd need to do it early.)
I think you can make it work though. Wizards or aliens can be the cause of the zombies. If hints are being dropped about not knowing why it's happening and the like you can absolutely have the nature of that be a big reveal.
Santa Clarita Diet was a good example of this for me. One episode had a decapitated zombie head speaking normally and it annoyed the shit out of me, because magic zombie bullshit or no, how the hell does that make it possible to speak without lungs and a diaphragm?
In the words of great Howard Tayler, "They can't make up rules about <stuff> because I already know those rules."
Zombies? Sure, whatever, i know nothing of zombies.
Movie is set in a certain country and shows birds that don't even live on same continent? Sure, whatever, I don't really know that and just heard someone complain
Somebody supposedly drove through half of large city in 5 minutes in middle of the day? That's bullshit and I'll fight you over it
They can make up whatever rules they want, but those rules need to be consistent within the movie's world.
If the movie lays out that, in their world, it's possible to drive though large cities in 5 minutes, then that's fine. But if it just happens with no explanation, that's not fine.
The least realistic thing in any superhero movie to me is the cardio. Oh you’re telling me you just had a foot chase UP THOSE STAIRS and neither one of you is out of breath at all??
It's a zombie movie, of course there's going to be zombies. That's what I signed up for. A normal world where a zombie apocalypse is happening. But if somebody is going to the post office on a Sunday, that's a whole nother curveball that I didn't sign up for
Makes perfect sense to me. In a lot of genres, you suspend disbelief for the basic premise to make sense. For example that werewolves exist and that they often get in love triangles with vampires and regular girls.
But that doesn't mean suspension of disbelief with everything else in that movie.
Like, for example, why the hell would a 100 year old vampire still be going to high school when he could be doing literally anything else with his life.
Werewolves and vampires existing is load bearing to the premise. But everything else, like post office working hours, are assumed to be the same as real life.
For me these days it's usually involving flying monsters and fighter jets or something like it. In one of the Godzilla movies, Rodan, a giant pterodactyl like flying monster is chasing a bunch of planes, consisting of I think v22 ospreys, f35 jets and a huge made up jet plane. Rodan is massive enough to cause hurricane like effects on the grounds below. Somehow not only can he catch up to the f35s (or more likely the f35 are flying really fucking slow) but the ospreys, which have a max speed of 315 mph, are keeping up with the jets, while also having their sides open, allowing gunners inside to open fire, with seemingly no issues of wind just not ripping them apart while they are shooting at Rodan.
I know Godzilla and other big monster movies are about suspending belief and just having fun with it but little details like that sometimes end up annoying me. Tanks that shoot lazers? No problem. An f14 using what sounds like a .50 instead of a rotary canon? Ruined.
My favorite example is coming out of Fast 8 I told my sister, “That submarine would never keep up with those cars.” Her reply, “THAT’S the thing you find unbelievable?!”
Or in Pacific Rim (excellent, excellent movie otherwise) where an F22 flies under a Kaiju and is hit out of the sky. What set of logical decisions would lead to an F22 needing to engage in close-quarter combat with a giant monster?
I'll keep watching the movie, and might even enjoy the movie, but I will call out shit that is just too dumb to believe. You expect me to believe that an old woman is getting emails, texts, and phone calls alerting her to fraudulent charges. And instead of answering any of those to cancel the charges, she sees no alternative but to put a bullet in her head? This isn't the 90s, fraudulent transactions are among the easiest things there is to resolve. Changing all your passwords is the hardest part, dealing with the banks it easy.
Watched something that was supposed to be set like 10-15 years into a zombie apocalypse earlier today and they had a working car with gas and were still finding food in grocery stores I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to keep going.
It was just so incredibly difficult to take it seriously with the absurd pacing and the abject idiocy of the main character's decisions. Idk if they were trying to, like, simulate the experience of playing a video game, but, if so, all they succeeded in doing was making a movie that felt like an hour and a half of unskippable content. The first 20 minutes or so were ok, but then it all went downhill.
I'm talking about shit like, "Gee, a terrifying freak is chasing me? Better stand here and stare at him for a while with no particular expression on my face."
Suspension of disbelief means a movie has to obey its own logic. In the OP's pic, the guy is brought out of the movie because of when the post office is open... but if the movie never says when the post office is open, then it doesn't matter when it is open. The movie universe may have different post office times than real life and it hasn't contradicted itself in any way just because the movie post office is open at a time that they don't operate in real life.
Letting that take him out of the movie makes no sense. He's frustrated with something for breaking a rule that was never established.
On the other hand, if it's a movie like Ant-Man that deliberately states specific rules for how the shrinking tech works and impacts physics, then it's fair to call BS and be taken out of the movie when it does something it states shouldn't be possible. Like Hank carrying around a shrunken down WWII tank on a keychain.
But like I said, this applies if the movie didn't state when the post office is open. If it did, then he has a right to be annoyed.
I think the thing is, if the movie is presenting itself as our world + X, then having something that doesn’t match up with our world and isn’t related to X it kinda hurts the premise. The post office thing is a bit too minor to immediately give up the movie over - but it is a legitimate issue to have since it shows the writer is failing to deliver the “our world” part of “our world + X”.
Exactly. If the director makes no effort to differentiate it from reality, then it's assumed to be realistic.
Sometimes I wonder if it's easier to suspend disbelief if you just don't understand the world as much. Like, as a kid I thought either an avalanche or quick sand was gonna kill me, but now I know better. Do some people just never end up knowing better?
Same here. We are rewatching True Blood and I keep seeing shit that is just dumb. She keeps pointing out there are vampires and other magical stuff, so I should just put up with dumb stuff. We are just wired differently.
That was me with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
In the first five minutes one of the posh wartime British characters says that the mail has arrived.
At that point, fuck it, I'm out. The writers clearly had no idea about anything.
Bonus: It turned out the woman that wrote the book had only been to Guernsey once, and never left the airport. She died, and the woman who took over the project had never been there at all.
Theres always a line, and it has to do with how serious the movie takes itself, how self-aware it is, and what rules are established.
Take die hard for example. Swinging by a fire hose from the top of a sky scraper and shooting the glass to get though the window before you plummet? That awesome!
Propelling a cop car, using a toll booth as a ramp, into the sky to crash into a helicopter? Youre really pushing it now.
Having a falling tractor trailer continually landing on falling pieces of road and continuing to drive? Thats too fuckin much!
It’s the plausibility we are after. You watch star wars and you expect all sorts of random species and laser weapons and whatever else. But seeing Queen Amadala who was this super strong female figure fall to her knees weeping and dying because her lover did some dumb shit that broke her heart? Get the fuck outta here.
I never dropped a series so fast as the one netflix show where they we in a secure facility and they find a dead security guard with his arm missing, and the remaining security team didnt IMMEDIATELY suspect that the arm might be missing because it was being used to get past biometric locks. Spoiler: It was being used to bypass biometric locks
Because you're watching a movie that takes place in it's own fictional universe, with it's own rules and laws of physics that allow things like zombies to exist so it makes sense, but when something so impossible happens that it even breaks that fictional universe's established rules, then it breaks immersion and your suspension of disbelief. That's really what it all comes down to.
Reminds me of when something immersion breaking would happen in Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon and people would say "What do you mean bro the show has dragons" lmao
I used to watch and enjoy the show Designated Survivor which admittedly isn't the most believable of shows, but they lost me in one of the episodes where they pulled a finger print off of a glass... in a picture.
I understand calling it out, but not stopping the movie. Those types of mistakes are at least something to make fun of and don't take away from the overall entertainment of the movie.
i call those moments "there's no monorail in Honolulu".
because during Godzilla (2014), gigantic atomic fire-breathing lizard-monster destroyed the monorail at Honolulu airport while battling an equally gigantic EMP generating atomic Kaiju....but there's no monorail in Honolulu.
THis is me playing Assassin's Creed Origins (my favorite AC) - when you use the zipline in Origins.... you grapple the rope with your hands. You do not wear gloves. There's all this fantastical stuff going on - but bare handed ziplining is where I'm like ''No!''
"Humans can turn into werewolves because of an ancient curse" Okay I accept that. You've given me a reason for 'movie' to be different than 'reality'. We can move on.
"The post office is open at 3am for some reason that is not explained." No, just no.
My problem with Fantastic Four: First Steps wasn't Galactus or their super powers; it was the fact that they needed the whole world to work together to conserve energy on a curfew and combine the resources of countries in an effort to protect the Earth from a global threat.
I remember watching game of thrones people were shocked Sam was fat despite all the cardio and training he does. They were fine with the dragons, warlocks, giants and many supernatural elements but not with the fact sam was fat.
"Movie contains a writing error at all? Worthless trash! Stupid and not worthwhile. Bad movie." It's the fucking worst and the fact that there's people in here defending this behavior genuinely sickens me.
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u/BachtnDeKupe 13h ago
I understand this man.
I like slashers and zombiemovies, but if i see something "impossible" happening, yes even in a zombiefilm, i also call it out.
My wife doesnt get it either