While watching a movie/ tv show, we don’t always question the reality of the situation because we know it’s not real. However, when you take a step back and think about some of the things that occur all the time in film, you start to realize just how unrealitistic some things really are.
Here, people share things that happen all the time in film that don’t actually occur that way in real life.
1/29. Chloroform won’t knock you out in seconds, it takes about 5 minutes of huffing on a soaked rag.
2/29. You can have a three bedroom apartment in new York or Los Angeles and be the only one living there on a part time waitress/waiter/barista wages and still have money left over to constantly go out.
3/29. That if you are persistent enough, whacky enough and keep pushing, you will get the girl and not a restraining order. Girl not interested? That’s OK, do something crazy like pretend to be someone else to get close to her, she’ll come around and fall in love with you. If she doesn’t, you aren’t stalking her enough. Everyone at the end will have a good laugh about it, right before she agrees to marry you.
4/29. Vents being perfectly clean and a perfect way to sneak through guards.
5/29. “We got flatline! Get the defibrillator!”
Electricity does not revive dead people. Dr. Frankenstein is fictional. If a defibrillator could resurrect people, it would have a cooler name. A defibrillator forcefully stops the heart temporarily in an effort to correct a heart in fibrillation (defibrillator!). Using a defibrillator on a dead person is like hitting the reset button on an unplugged machine.
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6/29. I live in Kazakhstan and I don’t even want to start.
7/29. High school students look like attractive, acne-free college students.
8/29. Clonking someone on the head will knock them out for a few minutes, after which they’ll get up and suffer no other consequences.
9/29. A fast travelling vehicle can get serious air and land with no structural consequences and without the passengers suffering injury.
10/29. Astronomer here! There are a lot of bad things people think are true about astronomy because of movies, but to just highlight one: asteroid fields are completely different than what most people think they’re like. People tend to think of this crazy cramped field like in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back as the norm, but in actuality there is, on average, millions of kilometers between asteroids!
Think of it this way (comment continues on the next page…).
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Think of it this way: there are ~100,000 asteroids that are larger than a kilometer or so. If we think of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, that still leaves you an average spacing of 5 million kilometers between asteroids. In fact, there are so few that rather than having to worry about sending spacecraft through it due to too many, NASA had serious issues when Galileo was flying through on its way to Jupiter to ensure it passed close enough to asteroids to photograph them!
If anything, a planetary ring system is probably closer to the movie conception of an asteroid field as those consist of billions of particles… but those particles are primarily ice, and only the size of a speck of sand for the most part, so it’s nowhere near as dramatic in some ways. Cassini will be going through Saturn’s rings next year though, so we’ll learn a lot more about them then!
11/29. That shooting guns indoors without earplugs causes no injury.
12/29. Zooming into a blurry image somehow also increases its clarity and level of detail.
13/29. Shooting a car….causes it to explode in flames!
14/29. Getting pushed back by the impact of a bullet.
15/29. Anything remotely solid is bulletproof. Take cover behind this… folding table?
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16/29. Grenades are not fire-y explosions. There’s a lot of force, but no fire. It looks more like a tiny, short dust storm.
17/29. You can easily kill people wearing armor by swinging a sword at them. The entire reason you wear armor is because it stops sword slashes. You never see half swording or any other anti armor techniques.
18/29. That Kookaburras are all over the world. You watch just about every jungle scene ever, and you’ll hear the classic Australian bird with its infamous call. From Predator to Lost.
It’s actually native to Australia and Australia only. Not even Papa New Guinea.
Along the same lines, lions do not live in jungles either.
19/29. The whole hacking stuff. They reach some levels that it seems a self parody.
20/29. Cops always go to strip clubs during an investigation.
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21/29. That if you find a case with some wires and a timer display that it’s a bomb.
22/29. British redcoats are always displayed in a completely inaccurate way.
They’ve always got posh British accents and nice clean uniforms. In reality they were often from poorer backgrounds, especially compared to their French counterparts. They were rougher, difficult to handle and had a reputation in Europe for horrible manners.
Uniforms of that time are always portrayed as nicely ironed with nice white shirts, which is quite an achievement when you consider thousands more would die from disease while on the march than actual combat. At the Battle of Waterloo all the British soldiers actually had pink trousers on because the red dye from their coat ran down because of the thunderstorms.
23/29. Catching someone that’s falling 10 stories before they hit the ground will save their life!
24/29. What a silencer sounds like.
25/29. Undercover police can’t lie about it if you ask them. Oh and that you have to wait 24 hours to report a missing person. Not true.
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26/29. All the fire sprinklers going off at once. Deluge systems are only installed around volatile stockpiles.
27/29. Ex-casino croupier here. Counting cards really isn’t that complicated. It just takes practice.
28/29. Big explosions and sound in space.
29/29. Nuclear power plants don’t explode just because they’ve gone critical. Relax guys, a nuclear plant needs to be critical in order to work.