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Legolas surfing down stairs on his shield one shotting enemies with a bow is perhaps cool, but cheapens the sacrifice of the men dying to defend Helm's Deep. Same with him soloing one of the giant elephants and all its crew in the third film. Why waste resources building fortresses when you could just train up a handful of elves and make an elf primarch death star that scythes through any enemy forces they come across. Send them into Mordor, empty it in a few days and send word back that it's safe to bring the ring now

It also really bugs me when the protagonists in a HH book are super powered and the enemy legion they're fighting are nothing more than cannon fodder, going down in one perfect hit every time. I'm just finishing Wolfsbane and it's a bad offender for this.You'd think the Luna Wolves are conscripts who've been put in scary looking power armour for the sole purpose of putting over the Space Wolves. Ugh.

Short answer, yes.

Long answer? Geek culture has become overly concerned with "plot holes," whose definition has been stretched into a catch all on par with "ironic" and "shallow and pendantic". In response, we see a lot of movies that are overly concerned with air tight plot at the expense of narrative pacing. Long slow info dumps because the audience is no longer capable of accepting that things just work the way they work anymore.

To be fair, some of that is a result of the emphasis on evergreen franchises. With worlds that never really end, there's a much greater tendency for people to "live" in them outside of the narrative, which creates a greater demand for this sort of thing.

Still, I watched A New Hope over the break again and forgot how much of what I "know" isn't in the movie at all. Nothing irks me more than sparse seconds we see two vaguely similar women in the bar who are not in fact, famous twin sister con artists, but two con artists posing as the famous twin sister con artists. Modern movies bother with this stuff, and they're definitely worse off for it.

A lot of it is rooted in a score card mentality. Geek cred and the pursuit of that which is truly trivial is the core of this. Where I can really tell its been taken too far is TVTropes. What was once pretty genuinely funny and insightful has become a ridiculous exercise in defining a half dozen tropes for ever minute or two of content, largely so people can find some new territory to claim in the endless race to see who can pick the most nits. The sight has become a boring collection of people who missed the joke and mistook it for legitimate criticism.

Of course, the reason we see all of this is because all our communication tools are not designed for criticism of any depth. Anything of substance is pretty much doomed to the same kind of TLDR as this post.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Have we become too concerned with realism (or what we think is realistic) at the expense of actually enjoying a good dramatic production?

At some level, the viewer has to identify with the characters and the situation presented as "real" within the context of the movie. A good dramatic production maintains some sort of believable consistency throughout the story. If the unreality (Deus Ex Machina / Ass-pull / Idiot Ball) breaks the suspension of disbelief, then how can you enjoy it as a serious work? You can't, which is why mass zaniness doesn't really work outside screwball comedy.


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 Snake Tortoise wrote:
You'd think the Luna Wolves are conscripts who've been put in scary looking power armour for the sole purpose of putting over the Space Wolves. Ugh.

They're actually Commonwealth Troops being expended to preserve the sons of England.

 LunarSol wrote:
Long answer? Geek culture has become overly concerned with "plot holes," whose definition has been stretched into a catch all on par with "ironic" and "shallow and pendantic". In response, we see a lot of movies that are overly concerned with air tight plot at the expense of narrative pacing. Long slow info dumps because the audience is no longer capable of accepting that things just work the way they work anymore.

Except that's not what people mean by "plot holes". We aren't talking about nitpicking the details of how a piece of technology works or whatever, the sort of thing that can be "fixed" by long info dumps. We're talking about situations where characters act in stupid or out of character ways because that's what the next step in the plot requires, where the audience has to forget the thing they saw earlier in the movie because the new thing contradicts it, etc. To give a popular "geek media" example, consider C-3PO in the Star Wars prequels. We're told that Vader built C-3PO, but he doesn't show any sign of recognizing the droid at all when they meet in ESB. The problem is not that Lucas didn't include enough info dumps about how C-3PO was a common model of droid and Vader has memory problems, it's that he pulled a lazy nostalgia attempt in the prequels by bringing back characters from the original movies without bothering to think about the consequences of that story choice. That's just plain bad writing regardless of genre.

IMO if there's any change at all in how we view these things it's that "geek culture" has become more respectable and therefore held to higher standards. If you're watching a porn movie you don't complain about how unrealistic it is that the pizza delivery guy shows up wearing nothing but a pizza box and the hot customer conveniently doesn't have any money to pay, the plot is just a flimsy excuse for what you really want and you're not going to remember or care about it the next day. Same thing with the geek equivalents. When "geek culture" is considered to be a porn movie but with spaceships instead of sex the standards are low. The flaws are still there, but nobody cares because they expect it to be flawed. But when "geek culture" goes mainstream, gains huge budgets and top-tier talent, and expects to be treated as serious art and literature and such, well, those flaws are no longer so excusable. If a director shovels out garbage as quickly as possible to make an easy profit we're going to point out that the product sucks.

 Azreal13 wrote:

The "prank call" thing is a perfect example - in what way does that fit with the rest of Star Wars? The rest of the movie? The rest of even just that scene?

Boring conversation anyway.

And that comparison shows exactly why I can never have these kinds of discussions. I've seen your posts, you're an intelligent person, you must grasp how ludicrous a comparison that is given the contexts of the two scenes, but people are so desperate to prove they're a Big Brain who doesn't care about silly nerd stuff they'll make really, really daft claims and then plant the flag and defend them to the death, because they know anyone who takes the time to actively rebut the flaws in their position can be painted as some ranting sadsack.

 Peregrine wrote:
Except that's not what people mean by "plot holes". We aren't talking about nitpicking the details of how a piece of technology works or whatever, the sort of thing that can be "fixed" by long info dumps.

I see people nitpicking the details of how a piece of technology/a super power/whatever tiny insignificant detail works and declaring plot holes all the time.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Except that's not what people mean by "plot holes". We aren't talking about nitpicking the details of how a piece of technology works or whatever, the sort of thing that can be "fixed" by long info dumps.

I see people nitpicking the details of how a piece of technology/a super power/whatever tiny insignificant detail works and declaring plot holes all the time.

Technology needs to remain consistent for verisimilitude. If the car Riggs drives in Lethal Weapon 3 suddenly started flying because the plot needed it to, would you consider pointed it out nitpicking?

I assume you're talking about Star Wars or Star Trek with that comment, both long series built upon a setting with clearly identifiable rules and expectations. When the rules are broken, or expectations broken against precedent, it makes the film inconsistent and pulls any viewer paying attention out of the movie.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:


Technology needs to remain consistent for verisimilitude. If the car Riggs drives in Lethal Weapon 3 suddenly started flying because the plot needed it to, would you consider pointed it out nitpicking?

No.

I do however remember the cliche'd argument about "The Enterprise can't do X" and the nerd rage that followed that came with every JJ Trek film. And then there was the one time someone was like "The Flash would never fall for Y cause in this one panel he says he can react down to the wateversecond."

I'm not saying there's no merit in attacking a lack of consistency, but I frequently see people invoke plot hole over really tiny stupid gak. Everyone knows the shields exist in Star Trek, so yeah I agree is odd in the Dominion War when people openly talk about how they have shields even though in every battle all the ships seem to have them turned off, but then you get the people who bitch about how Kirk got from the bridge to the engine room in ten minutes like it's some herculian leap in logic that he took the elevator and just got there.

I see two sides here. There's lazy script writing, which often favors sensational set piece action sequences with little thought given to internal coherence. Then there's the fans, who seem to relish jumping on even the smallest and most insignificant of details so they can rant about it on the internet.

 LordofHats wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:


Technology needs to remain consistent for verisimilitude. If the car Riggs drives in Lethal Weapon 3 suddenly started flying because the plot needed it to, would you consider pointed it out nitpicking?

No.

I do however remember the cliche'd argument about "The Enterprise can't do X" and the nerd rage that followed that came with every JJ Trek film. And then there was the one time someone was like "The Flash would never fall for Y cause in this one panel he says he can react down to the wateversecond."

I'm not saying there's no merit in attacking a lack of consistency, but I frequently see people invoke plot hole over really tiny stupid gak. Everyone knows the shields exist in Star Trek, so yeah I agree is odd in the Dominion War when people openly talk about how they have shields even though in every battle all the ships seem to have them turned off, but then you get the people who bitch about how Kirk got from the bridge to the engine room in ten minutes like it's some herculian leap in logic that he took the elevator and just got there.

I see two sides here. There's lazy script writing, which often favors sensational set piece action sequences with little thought given to internal coherence. Then there's the fans, who seem to relish jumping on even the smallest and most insignificant of details so they can rant about it on the internet.

Some is nitpicking - some is not.

For example in startrek with shields. Sometimes it is portrayed as a bubble sheild (I think that is the cooler version) and sometimes it is portrayed as a force projection seeming to come from close to the hull (this is more common in earlier startrek films). It's hard for me to forgive but I can forgive it - they became much more consistent with it when CGI made things easier on screen. Also - I think a lot of the time in startrek when ships are getting ambushed - their sheilds ARE down (what's stupid is they aren't destroyed when being hit by antimatter weapons with their sheilds down). We have to assume - sheilds are very taxing to the ships power supply - otherwise they would always be "up". You are right though - stuff like that is just weak. But it is more of a nitpick. It doesn't hurt the realism...you can always say...well their armor is super powerful too ( )

The you have TLJ with hyper-drive suicide. This invalidates the entire story of starwars....It invalidates the deathstar - invalidates deathstar 2....just so they could get that really cool looking epic shot. And stuff like lasers arching in open space...WTF is that man?

Well the Dominion War arc explained it by saying that shields had become ineffective against newer weapon harmonics or some such. Early Dominion polaron weapons didn't get stopped by shields for example.

The real reason of course is budget. It was already expensive making battle scenes with dozens of ships on screen and they didn't have the money to add shield flickers to all of them so they just quietly pretended.

Which I was fine with, and I can get the people who saw it as odd. I'm talking about the really stupid stuff though. I'm talking the morons who cite joules when asking how the Enterprise couldn't penetrate the shields. If you're nitpicking down to that level you probably weren't remotely invested to begin with, so complaining about your lack of investment comes off as tedious and self-indulgent more than anything.

Star Trek is kind of a bad example if we're going to hold the writers and producers accountable for technological consistency and realism. 100% of the technology in Star Trek operates on make believe, and the rules governing its operation change frequently as demanded by the plot. And every time it happens they just pull out of a short lexicon of phrases such as "phase" and "subspace" to explain why. Transporters work this way, until they don't and we need them to perform some hitherto unmentioned function to save our bacon, etc.

On the other hand, no serious person watches Star Trek for its scientific realism. It's more about one man's utopian vision of a possible future society and the travails and adventures the members of that society experience as spacefairing explorers. To my knowledge Star Trek was never promoted as a well considered and realistic take on space flight or exploration. It just uses the possibility of advanced technology to explore sociopolitical and ethical quandaries.

Internal consistency is important, respect for the time investment of the audience is important, but it's also important to judge different pieces of work in the context in which they're presented. Star Trek violating its own made up scientific principles IS consistent because they only exist to facilitate other themes and plot devices anyway.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:

The "prank call" thing is a perfect example - in what way does that fit with the rest of Star Wars? The rest of the movie? The rest of even just that scene?

Boring conversation anyway.

And that comparison shows exactly why I can never have these kinds of discussions. I've seen your posts, you're an intelligent person, you must grasp how ludicrous a comparison that is given the contexts of the two scenes, but people are so desperate to prove they're a Big Brain who doesn't care about silly nerd stuff they'll make really, really daft claims and then plant the flag and defend them to the death, because they know anyone who takes the time to actively rebut the flaws in their position can be painted as some ranting sadsack.

Right, I'm making one response then I'm out, this isn't a thread about the Last Jedi, and I've no wish to either make it about that or participate in one.

The paradigms of the two exchanges are the same. "Hot shot pilot character, who hitherto hasn't really done anything of particular comic note, has comedy conversation over intercom in an attempt to delay/distract the bad guys."

You can bang on about "context" all you like, but you asked for how it was Star Wars and I showed just one example where comedy and Star Wars are hand in glove.

What it boils down to is whether you feel it works as a scene or not, and then it becomes a matter of personal preference. I strongly suspect that the comparison is "ludicrous" to you because you simply don't like TLJ.

It isn't even like bad comedy is unusual in SW. I mean, I find Chewie yodeling like Tarzan in ROTJ jarring to this day, plus literally everything Jar Jar is involved with.

Subjectively you're entitled to like what you like, but objectively there's a large body of precedent within the SW cinematic universe to entirely justify the scene.

When I do the nitpicking it is insightful and genius! When someone else does it..... not so much.




Edit: I prefer to attack a film for the subtextual message it is trying to tell me about life. That's were the pretentious fun is!

 Azreal13 wrote:


What it boils down to is whether you feel it works as a scene or not, and then it becomes a matter of personal preference. I strongly suspect that the comparison is "ludicrous" to you because you simply don't like TLJ.

People raised points about tone and timing, and you are conveniently ignoring them.
You can reliably measure the amount of time the "boring conversation" joke takes, and how long the dragged on catastrophe of the mama joke is in TLJ.

Yes, but "this scene isn't very good" and "this scene doesn't belong in Star Wars" aren't the same argument and I'm not debating the first one.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Yes, but "this scene isn't very good" and "this scene doesn't belong in Star Wars" aren't the same argument and I'm not debating the first one.

But even the second is wrong. The scene doesn't fit because it's the wrong kind of humor for Star Wars. The scene with Han is in character, the humor is in the situation and how Han fumbles his attempt to talk his way out of trouble. You're laughing at it, but it's something that could plausibly happen in the Star Wars setting. And that makes it feel real and fit with a serious movie like Star Wars. Contrast that with Poe's prank call, where it's completely out of character. We're supposed to believe that this serious hero character, who has never been comic relief up until this point, is going to open a battle by literally making a prank call to the enemy leader. It's ridiculous and against the tone of everything else, and feels like a comedy routine being performed instead of a character acting naturally. If you showed someone that scene before they watched TLJ they'd probably think it was some kind of parody of Star Wars rather than a real scene.


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 Azreal13 wrote:
Right, I'm making one response then I'm out

Yep. Just one response...

That's the one kind of realism I can't forgive the lack of. Characters behaving inconsistently with their disposition and motivations is worse to me than a lack of realism in physics or what have you.

 Luciferian wrote:
That's the one kind of realism I can't forgive the lack of. Characters behaving inconsistently with their disposition and motivations is worse to me than a lack of realism in physics or what have you.

This is basically why I couldn't like Voyager. Kate Mulgrew described herself as playing Janeway as a woman with bipolar disorder because her character went back and forth from episode to episode (cause the writers all disagreed about what kind of captain she should be), and it wasn't just Janeway who had the problem. About the only consistent characters in the show were the Doctor and Harry Kim.

 LordofHats wrote:


This is basically why I couldn't like Voyager. Kate Mulgrew described herself as playing Janeway as a woman with bipolar disorder because her character went back and forth from episode to episode (cause the writers all disagreed about what kind of captain she should be), and it wasn't just Janeway who had the problem. About the only consistent characters in the show were the Doctor and Harry Kim.

The Doctor practically carried that show on his own. Some inconsistency is to be expected with an episodic format and a rotating crew of writers and directors, but then again plenty of shows do manage to keep it all straight in spite of that.

Agreed. I think that's a big part of why other sci-fi serials like TNG, DS9, SG-1 worked so well, even with their own flaws. Consistent character work can carry you a long way with an audience and right past a lot of other problems.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Except that's not what people mean by "plot holes". We aren't talking about nitpicking the details of how a piece of technology works or whatever, the sort of thing that can be "fixed" by long info dumps.

I see people nitpicking the details of how a piece of technology/a super power/whatever tiny insignificant detail works and declaring plot holes all the time.

Technology needs to remain consistent for verisimilitude. If the car Riggs drives in Lethal Weapon 3 suddenly started flying because the plot needed it to, would you consider pointed it out nitpicking?

I assume you're talking about Star Wars or Star Trek with that comment, both long series built upon a setting with clearly identifiable rules and expectations. When the rules are broken, or expectations broken against precedent, it makes the film inconsistent and pulls any viewer paying attention out of the movie.

The point here I think is that some people have built up "clearly identifiable rules and expectations" which aren't the focus of the series which is a dramatic 'liberal-progressive' SF universe. In other words, externally generated "rules" are imposed on the programme, and they aren't always going to be met because firstly, they aren't the programme's rules at all, and secondly, the point of the programme is not to meet some set of rules, but to set up and resolve dramatic situations for the characters.

As such, if the transporter needs to do X to put the away team into a situation of dramatic tension, that's what the transporter will do, even if some people think it should do Y.

I think the writers of Legends of Tomorrow have talked about this before. They've said they'll do as many completely crazy and ridiculous things as they can think of and as long as they're allowed but the one thing they'll always, always respect is their characters and their relationships.

Because, at the end of the day, that's what the show is about.

If we talk about american movies I think yes, both the producers and the public are overly concerned about realism.

I mean, stupid interactions between the characters (aka unlikley love stories) and plot holes are largely tolerated but what about the aesthetics?

I read a lot of critiques about Emma Stone getting the leading female role in Aloha because the original character was from Hawaii so she must look asiatic. Someone has even invented a word to define cases like this one: whitewashing. But seriously, is that a problem? Who cares about that? Emma Stone is a terrific comedy actress and that role could have been great for the success of the movie. Which ended up a flop for other reasons (actings and plot), not because one of the protagonist didn't look like the character in the book.

Another example can be made about biopics where every detail is perfectly portrayed and the actors/actresses become look alike of the real people they are impersonating. But who cares about Gary Oldman being identical to Churchill? It's the acting and the screen play that matter, not the (over) realism.

In this sense I think there's an overreaction to realism.

I can't stand two characters that hate each other, have nothing in common and yet fall in love while I don't care if an actor looks completely different from the character's aesthetics he's portraying if it's a real one or something taken from the novels, comics, videogames, ecc...

 Blackie wrote:
But seriously, is that a problem?

Yes. Aside from the realism aspect it's a problem because it almost always happens in one direction: taking a character that is described as non-white in the source material or should be non-white to fit the setting and casting a white person in the role. It rarely goes the other way, with a previously-white character getting a non-white actor. That's a significant problem when non-white actors and characters are already badly under-represented.


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 Kilkrazy wrote:
As such, if the transporter needs to do X to put the away team into a situation of dramatic tension, that's what the transporter will do, even if some people think it should do Y.

And this is writing. If it's a plot point in one episode that the transporter can't go through shields and a plot point in the next episode that it can the setting loses its sense of internal consistency. You're no longer watching characters in a "real" world, everything is happening at the whim of the plot regardless of how much sense it makes. And that rapidly kills off the drama and tension. You know a resolution is coming, you know that it won't necessarily follow from previous events, so why does the current action matter? Worse, you keep having to ask yourself why the characters have suddenly forgotten everything that happened in the previous episode and become clueless idiots for the sake of the plot.

The solution is to stop using technology as a plot device unless you're willing to commit to internal consistency in your universe, especially if you're going to insist on milking the cash cow of an existing IP for decades and making consistency with that established history a primary selling point.

"Whitewashing" is a problem because minority ethnic performers already have a much more limited selection of roles than the dominant white group.

To relate it to the topic, though, fiction is fiction, not fact. Actors are playing roles, not being themselves.

There's no reason why a black woman can't play the part of a white male character in a fiction production. If you go and produce Shakespeare in a Nigerian girls' school you won't get it done any other way.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Actors are playing roles, not being themselves.

However, they have to be believable in that role. Having a black woman as Luke in a remake of Star Wars works just fine, neither his race nor his gender are significant parts of the character. Having a black woman playing the role of a KKK member does not work, because being white is a key part of the (hypothetical) character. And yes, that's what you're going to have to do in your hypothetical Nigerian girls' school, but it's understood that amateur school productions are not going to be high in quality and you work with what you've got. The same doesn't apply for a movie with an obscenely huge budget and the ability to hire anyone they want for a role.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
But seriously, is that a problem?

Yes. Aside from the realism aspect it's a problem because it almost always happens in one direction: taking a character that is described as non-white in the source material or should be non-white to fit the setting and casting a white person in the role. It rarely goes the other way, with a previously-white character getting a non-white actor. That's a significant problem when non-white actors and characters are already badly under-represented.

Choosing an actor/actresses is always a choice of marketing, it has nothing to do with racism. Companies want to profit, nothing else. In the example I made, maybe there wasn't an actress with asiatic look that was considered good enough for the part or interesting enough to attract more public. On the other hand I see a lot of non-white actors, actresses, directors and productions that are overly rewarded at the academy awards (and similar events) with several wins that were clearly a compensation for the issue you described, because it's true that they are under-represented in comparison with the country population.

What's the problem with a female or a black James Bond for example? A black spider-man? If the acting was solid there shouldn't be any race or gender issues, they are generic characters that can be refreshed. Of course historical and real ones should keep the original race, gender and age but even if the people portraying them don't look exactly identical under hours of make up and special effects it shouldn't be a problem at all. In the matter of biopics the absolute realism about aesthetics has the same role than special effects in action movies, they give something to the public in order to shift the attention from the plot holes, or the fact that many biopics are absolutely boring and deal with characters of no interest, but if they're beautifully portrayed maybe it's enough for the critics and the public.

Movies like Jackie or First Man deal with matters of very little interest and they are extraordinary boring, but how the movies' teams managed to portray those characters and their specific historical period was outstanding. In the end how did I care about realism? I almost fell asleep when I watched those movies, despite I loved the actors, actresses and directors. Appartently being very consistent to realism is more important than the acting and the screen play.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Actors are playing roles, not being themselves.

However, they have to be believable in that role. Having a black woman as Luke in a remake of Star Wars works just fine, neither his race nor his gender are significant parts of the character. Having a black woman playing the role of a KKK member does not work, because being white is a key part of the (hypothetical) character. And yes, that's what you're going to have to do in your hypothetical Nigerian girls' school, but it's understood that amateur school productions are not going to be high in quality and you work with what you've got. The same doesn't apply for a movie with an obscenely huge budget and the ability to hire anyone they want for a role.

Sophie Okonedo -- a black actress -- was great in the role of Queen Margaret in the BBC's adaptation of several of Shapespeare's history plays a couple of years ago.

 Blackie wrote:

I read a lot of critiques about Emma Stone getting the leading female role in Aloha because the original character was from Hawaii so she must look asiatic. Someone has even invented a word to define cases like this one: whitewashing. But seriously, is that a problem?

Because being replaced with white people has been kind of a sore point for a lot of people, historically speaking.

Blackie wrote:
Choosing an actor/actresses is always a choice of marketing, it has nothing to do with racism.

Except when the racism is part of the marketing, either overtly or subconsciously. And yes, that does happen. 'So-and-so isn't right for the role' has a lot of layers, and some of those layers are racist and sexist.

And given how audiences react, it's understandable, if crappy, behavior (in terms of studio behavior priotizing cash over social issues, they're businesses). The pushback on, for example, on a minor character like Heimdall was really high. Casting Idris Elba as Thor was never even in the cards, it wasn't even imaginable. And yes, that is racism.

Your hypotheticals on Jame Bond and Spider-Man are just weird, because it's really obvious those aren't happening because of racism, and if it does happen, it will be a deliberate statement against racism that will 100% be part of the marketing. Same as the new Doctor was a deliberate statement against sexism that was in every single advertisement. Which is largely good, except they kind of forgot to make a show behind the advertising, and audiences being what they are, a lot of that is going to be blamed on her being a woman, rather than the writers/director.