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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Stupid Non-Science Fiction Science Fiction Movies
April 26th, 2009
There is a class of movies that is supposed to be set in the contemporary, modern day, real world and aren’t supposed to be science fiction. Technically not, anyway, and not marketed as such. Or at least have elements so far beyond what can easily be done today, elements glossed over and not even questioned, that they’re ridiculous.
I was reminded of this again reading a review of Crank: High Voltage, a movie in which the hero’s heart is stolen by the mob, and he’s given a replacement artificial heart in the meantime, with all sorts of implausbile results. Here’s one quote from the review:
Artificial hearts are pretty poor, primitive devices. They supply enough cardiac output to keep you slowly plodding around, but they certainly don’t allow for martial arts and sprinting. Overcharging them won’t give you super-speed, either.
Unfortunately, there are lots of other examples of this. I don’t know if it is just sloppy writing, sloppy research, or creators who just don’t give a shit and assume their audiences won’t either. A movie like Charlie’s Angels doesn’t bother me much in this sense — they basically wink at you while the impossible things are happening and let you know this is a fantasy world and not supposed to be anything close to reality.
B-movies seem to suffer from this flaw more than most. I assume that’s because the stakes are lower, they get less scrutiny, and are made by lesser talents. Furthermore, the people who watch B-movies (guilty too often) are very forgiving. There is almost the expectation that the movies will be entertaining as a result of their flaws. I saw one recently, I Know Who Killed Me, starring Lindsey Lohan. There was some ridiculousness with separated twins, but the bit that got me was the bionic limbs that she gets that were handled very, very badly. But hey, amputation isn’t really a big deal and can’t slow down a plot, you know?
But how about John Woo’s Face-Off? While there have been operations akin to face transplants, we’re supposed to believe that you can just instantly do such a good job that people will ignore the rest of the body? I kind of enjoyed the movie, but the silly premise almost made me walk out.
Most movies with computers have been implausible to impossible. Remember War Games? The graphics alone were not something computers of that era were set up to do, let alone a self-aware game playing program. Watching TV shows like CSI would make you think that you can just make computer animations of crimes and crime scenes in about three minutes or less.
Or how about movies/tv shows with robots that are perfect copies of people? We’re decades away from getting a humanoid robot that can walk around on its own and do anything coherently, let alone one that can fool a person into thinking it is human, let alone a specific human. I can just see writers sitting around going, “I got it! She can be a robot duplicate!” (Something like Stepford Wives doesn’t quite count, because the robots were the point of the story which was clearly science fiction.) Even Buffy had this nonsense, but given the nature of that show that brings me to a solution.
What I’d swallow better, to tell the truth, is magic. Just stop faking the science and technology. People who can write this shit and still sleep at night have no clue about the real world that science describes. It’s already all magic to them, anyway. Please, just make it magic. The hit man with the missing heart can have it stolen via a gypsy curse powered by a lightning storm. The face exchange can be done by a deal with the devil. And Lindsey Lohan can just have a wooden leg to match her acting.
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A movie like Charlie’s Angels doesn’t bother me much in this sense — they basically wink at you while the impossible things are happening and let you know this is a fantasy world and not supposed to be anything close to reality.
So do the Crank movies, actually, which are closer to Road Runner cartoons than any other action movies. The people behind Crank know their central plot devices are idiotic, that’s part of the point.
I didn’t like the first much and found it exhausting, and likely will never see the sequel. Shoot ’em Up was similarly insane, but a lot better, I though.
The androids of the Buffyverse (starting with Ted, played by the late great John Ritter) were annoying. The Hellmouth was a nice plot device to make all manner of supernatural activity in Sunnydale explainable. But no backstory was ever proposed to explain why the Hellmouth would make human replicant androids possible.
Didn’t actually see the first Crank, RN. That makes me feel a little better about it — it’s supposed to be ridiculous rather than serious. I agree, Shoot’em Up was not supposed to reflect reality (it’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon after all), and was entertaining if you like violence.
Dan, that’s really my point. Human replicant androids as portrayed in Buffy are totally ridiculous as serious year 2000 technology. If there’s a supernatural spin, ok, maybe I can buy it. Without that, it’s like WTF? John Ritter was very good in that one episode, and it was a late reveal, so fine. When they brought in a robot Buffy to do her job while she was dead though…heck, why wouldn’t every slayer from now on just commission mad scientists for an army of vampire killing robots so that they could get some sleep and have a social life?
The Buffy androids were made off-screen, off-stage and never explained. One had to assume there was science behind them because they were built by a human, possibly in his own living room out of bits found around the house. Later, it turns out that the character who built them was able to do magic with his friends, so maybe magic was involved in building the androids. The point is that we don’t know. I agree that the lack of explanation leaves a big gap in the story.
What I wonder about bad movies and TV shows is WHY? It costs a lot of money to make a film, and we often hear of how hard it is to get one made. Why, then, spend all that money on a bad one? Where’s the profit it making films that people won’t go to see?
Cheers
Morva Shepley
I think with bad movies getting made, it’s a perfect storm of the usual suspects. You have to put money up front before the thing is made. A good script can be ruined by bad directing, casting, acting, special effects, etc. And people with the money often respond to a pitch rather than a script, so in fact the script could be bad or non-existent. The pitch is the premise, which could be cool, and still lead to a bad movie. And there are enough cases of dumb premises leading to good movies (Tremors comes to mind).
With the “bad movies,” I’m sure many involved think it’s going to be great, or at least really good given the budget. I mean, I bet if you spent almost nothing on a vampire movie and it kind of sucked, just because it was a vampire movie some people would watch.
And because there are small budget films that make it big, everyone gets to trick themselves into believing they’re working on the next Blair Witch, Primer, the Crying Game, El Mariaci, etc.
As for the big budget flops? I blame creative power run amok. When Travolta or Costner or someone like that decides to do something, it gets done. And Battlefield Earth and Waterworld were not great ideas in the first place (although the latter had potential).
And then “bad” is subjective. I’m sure the producers of Armageddon were happy with the financial return. It’s a business to make money first. If you happen to make a quality piece of art, so much the better, as long as it makes money.
I’d just settle for some oversight on script stupidities. You’re going to spend millions on a movie, you can afford a few people to take a look and say, “Hey, GPS doesn’t work like that,” or “We’re at least decades away from building androids that can fool a human.”
The Buffy trick, keeping it off stage, is an old one. You don’t know how to make it plausible, so you don’t try. Show it as a done deal and many people will swallow it and won’t think too hard about it. Try to explain it, force them to think, and they’ll reject it, because it’s dumb.
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Hahaha! Producers really create some entirely impossible films. Crazy but sometimes they are entertaining.
Tony Robbins in SHALLOW HAL is another example. In a movie with an otherwise fun, interesting premise, I’m asked to believe that the brain can be hypnotized into having superpowers (e.g., telling someone’s quality at a glance and seeing a corresponding illusion of them). Tony Robbins is such a mythical guy that it almost works, but I’d rather it were just magic. I remember the gags with the giant panties, broken chairs, etc., and these were initially amusing but often led to cognitive dissonance where I wondered what kind of moron was Hal not to think his world had gone weird.
Then there’s just the PC thing that most unattractive women are really good on the inside, and most attractive women are not, but that’s a different issue.
I would give Wargames a break — indeed, I guess I always sort of thought of that as science fiction. They used the usual science fiction trope of making one really big leap — in this case, self-aware computers. Mind you, I haven’t seen the movie since I was the same age as Matthew Broderick was in the movie (which was about when the movie was first released), so may be it doesn’t hold up all that well, but I liked it well enough.
The one that bugs me, even though I really enjoy watching the show, is 24. 24 is absolutely full of stuff that makes no sense whatsoever. Most notably, the idea that torture *works* makes it clear that 24 is set in a parallel fantasy universe. Yet, too many of the people watching it seem to think it’s all very plausible– so much so that at a Republican primary, the ‘what if this situation from 24 happened’ question came up and was treated seriously by the candidates. (If I had been a candidate and was asked that question, I would have responded, “Well, what I would do is cross-circuit to B, and have Scotty target phasers 10 meters from my position, and beam out just in time”, or some such. If demanded to give a “real” answer, I’d say that if we got down to the point that we had mere hours or minutes to figure out what the terrorists were doing, we would have already failed horribly. Good drama doesn’t make for good reality….)
Rob, that’s a really good answer. Torture at best is a last-ditch effort when you’ve already failed. I think an even better answer is, “Americans don’t torture. That’s something only bad guys do.” Preferably after your debate opponents have said they’d do it.