I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
The comic relief only character.
No they’re not funny, you can’t write.That’s something I appreciated about the extended version of Lord of the Rings. Gimli was still used as comic relief a lot, but in the extended version he’s a fuller, more rounded out character. Better character development just made the comic relief bits funnier.
Grenades. A hand grenade has a kill radius of 5 meters and an injury radius of 15 meters. You’re not going to toss one around a corner and survive.
Eh, you are if you’re tossing it around a concrete wall. We tossed grenades into bunkers while laying half a foot from the opening when I was in the Army, and it was fine. You feel it, but you’re uninjured. Now if you mean something like a commercial office wall, then yes, you gonna die.
I don’t know if this is a trope or not but I hate it when movies fail to live up to their potential.
The new Beetlejuice movie is like that.
(I’ll try for no spoilers)
There’s a couple of events that are shown as really big ordeals, huge events that you could base the entire movie around, and then the movie rug pulls your expectations and just kind of brushes those huge issues aside like it’s nothing.
And part of me gets it that that’s like a Beetlejuice thing, not complying with your expectations, but in this case I feel like the movie was made much worse for it and they should have really reconsidered doing the things they did.
It just made the entire movie feel like there were no actual risks, nothing bad can possibly happen, there’s nothing scary or dangerous in the world.
It’s like everybody in the movie was bored of living in that universe. It was ridiculous.
I watch movies for escapism and I don’t want to see the people that I’m escaping from my life watching escaping from their lives in the same process, having everything handed to them without having to work for it, with no real risks and no real adventure and no real humanity in their story.
And I’m honestly kind of surprised at how many movies lately have failed to give real stakes, real risks to the main characters, real goals to achieve, a real character to operate with, or has attended to elevate the genre in any way.
It’s all same same and it’s really sad.
More of a cliche at this point maybe?
When the driver of a car is looking more at the passenger they’re talking to than the road. Probably a dead giveaway that the scene is shot with green screen or the car being towed on the back of a truck.
I used to hate it when people kept wobbling the steering wheel around when driving in a clearly straight road but then Top Gear had an episode featuring some American cars from the 1980s and constantly correcting the steering was necessary because there was so much loose play in the system!
Leaf spring suspension probably doesn’t help either…
My friend’s mom when I was a kid used to look at us in the back seat for minutes at a time while driving. She said she used the lines behind the car to stay in the lane. It scared the shit out of us, but somehow she never got into an accident. Granted, these were long, straight, country roads, not NYC streets.
What the hell 😳
For realz.
Yes, so much this, so hard to watch 😬 (And probablysetting a really bad example for the real world.)
I mean with the complexity of shooting in a moving car I have to wonder if it’s ever done now (in all but the most extreme necessity).
All they need to do to solve the problem is make sure to focus on the road. They don’t need to actually be driving, just act like they are driving by looking at the road more than their passenger.
Well that’s to solve the appearance, but I’m commenting with an actual physical car, on a closed road, being towed or not, etc. Don’t need the bother when you can green screen it.
Filmed in a real setting always looks less distracting than a green screen.
I agree, I’m just saying that I doubt many will go through the trouble unless it’s really necessary.
When there’s a breakfast table full of food but the protagonist is running late so they only take a bite of toast and then leaves.
The super badass guy. Just seems so lame.
Those guys definitely exist irl.
Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other’s state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like “I’m just going to ignore that second part.” I don’t even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn’t literally impossible and well known why it’s impossible for God’s sake.
Better yet, don’t use an explanation at all!
If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it’s no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it’s not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don’t waste time with useless technobabble!
Slap a “Zephyr FTL Communications” logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn’t always need to know how, just what. And show, don’t tell.
You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just… have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device “Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls”.
People in zombie movies and shows that don’t know what zombies are. I know it’s so they can use cool descriptions like “the infected” or “walkers” or “the dead”. The zombie word sounds kinda silly. But I still don’t like it.
I can tell you’ve never been to Baltimore in August… You see a junkie slowly shuffling down the street wearing sweats in 100° weather… Zombies make a bit more sense.
How every injury requires blood to be spit up.
But also “if someone slices you across the stomach with a big sword you don’t bleed you just hold your stomach and fall over while going ‘arrghh’”
I think monster should have rules. Zombies aren’t fast, there’s just so many they over take you. Dracula dies from a stake through the heart, and the Wolfman dies from a silver bullet
I’m okay with fast zombies as long as they are short-lived.
Like they should tear their own bodies apart and consume their own internal resources to be fast zombies until the point where they physically shut down and cannot operate anymore.
I have seen that in 28 Weeks later?
Funny, I just responded a similar response with 28 Days Later as an example and didn’t notice yours.
Interesting that you like the tropes. I like the fact that there’s some variation depending on your preference.
I like zombies that are infected and not reanimated. They’re fast but die from normal damage. 28 Days Later is one of my favorites and it’s a major point of emphasis.
The Walking Dead on the other hand is hard to take seriously sometimes because of the contrivances from slow moving zombies, and the fact that 10 year old zombies are still around bothers me. Although the idea of having a normal running society, but the dead reanimate is a very interesting concept that I would love to see explored.
The Walking Dead (tv series at least) is a great example of inconsistency undermining the overall rules for their world. Instead of the danger of the dead overrunning everything from outside, the danger of the recently deceased causing an outbreak in any sizeable community was a far more interesting threat in that setting. But they only did that for a little bit and went back to the overwhelming masses of dead and ‘people are the real monsters’ over and over.
Zombies in the George Romero tradition are basically just animated through magic. Otherwise it would be a World War Z (book) situation where the zombies would eventually just decompose entirely.
I can get behind fast zombies that are infected, I’m with you there. But I can’t suspend disbelief if a rotting corpse out of the ground can run like Usain bolt. Side note I would like to see monster stories that follow traditional folklore that isn’t well known. Werewolves can revert to human through their true love and vampires can’t be seen in mirrors only because silver was used to make mirrors but not anymore so we should be able to see vampire reflections in some mirrors. I think that would be cool if made plot relevant
Van Helsing did the mirror thing which was cool. I think Dracula Dead and Loving It did too.
Side thought. I loved in From Dusk Til Dawn when they’re trying to think of all the folklore that they could remember. Like whether silver was supposed to hurt vampires too or just werewolves.
Another side thought, I love when they know about the monsters like in Shaun of the Dead. It always bothers me when it’s an alternate universe that’s never heard of Zombies before.
When a story starts to bring in prophecy as part of the writing. As soon as a character does something “because the prophecy speaks of…”, I feel that the writers ran out of plausible ideas and use that as a cheap crutch.
Battlestar Galactica was a great show, but they should’ve skipped that part.
Since prophecy was such a core part of BSG, I feel it was done quite well
The Matrix is probably the only movie I’ve seen where this didn’t bother me.
One shot and the bad guy drops dead. Ten shots and the good guy goes to the hospital and lives.
Also you don’t instantly die when you’re shot.
Kinda depends where you get shot and with what gun/ammunition
One shot can definitely instantly kill you. Recently killed things don’t just lay there. They kick, and thrash, and shit, and piss, and it’s incredibly gruesome to watch. That’s probably why they don’t show realistic deaths.
Some romance tropes.
People doing creepy things and it being portrayed as romantic. Like stalking, or not taking no for an answer.
Love triangles. I spend a lot of time with polyamorous people, and would like to see more representation. and not like “a cishet monogamous person’s idea”. But even if you are monogamous, you can date different people for a bit before going all in on someone.
or not taking no for an answer.
I get what you’re saying, but I had to ask my wife for a date around six times over a period of around 3 months before she said yes. We’ve been together almost 20 years now. Sometimes the timing just isn’t right, and it’s okay to ask again if you’re not crazy.
There may be some small amount of nuance. Like if she says a hard no vs a not now, or if time has passed and circumstances changed significantly maybe.
But I’m confident that far more often than not, being repeatedly asked out after having said no is upsetting and may be a sign of danger. Is this person who isn’t accepting no on a date going to not accept no on sex, on me having friends, on other things?
Also, big norm breach, the person who said no could change their mind and reach out on their own.
Yeah, how you ask and how they answer has a lot to do with it. I wasn’t like “do you want to go on a date and be my girlfriend?”. It was more like “hey, want to grab some lunch today?”, or “hey, want to go for sushi Friday?”, or “want to meet for a drink tomorrow?”. They were all pretty open ended questions, asked in person. You definitely have more opportunities when you know someone IRL than when you’re just asking a stranger on the internet. It turns out that she always liked me, but was dealing with some personal tragedy when I started asking her, so the timing was just wrong. Once she was somewhat finished dealing with that, she said yes, plus we had gotten to know each other better during that time.
When there is a computer problem and they call some guy who presses like two keys and fixes it. Or when they type really fast and click a lot of things and then it fixes it.
Because of Hollywood way too many people believe that’s how you actually fix a computer or technology, and then when your boss sees you not clicking or typing that fast, your boss thinks you’re an idiot and don’t know what you’re doing. Thank you, Hollywood for brainwashing people.
Often we do press 2 keys and fix it. That’s what they see when tech support drops by so they thinks it’s magic and all fixes work like that.
Yup. That’s when I get the “what do we pay you for if it was that easy to fix?” … it was that easy to fix because I know what I’m doing!
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
For reference, £10 in 1908 would be worth roughly $1000 today and there were 20s in a pound, so 10s would be worth about $50 today.
what do we pay you for if it was that easy to fix
The years of studying and ten years of experience required to know that those two keys would solve the problem.
I’m pretty tired of the sanctity of life trope. Especially when the hero kills a thousand henchmen to get to the villain, and then all of the sudden decides it would be wrong to kill a guy who is trying to destroy the world or whatever.
Also the hostage trope where they point a gun at someone and say “drop your gun” and the hero does so. How fucking stupid are you? Just shoot the guy in the face.
Also major injuries that take a year to recover from, but somehow Mr. Average guy is running around and fighting 2 minutes later.