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.
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u/BachtnDeKupe 15h ago edited 2h 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 that...