Listen, I’ve been guilty of this myself, but something that makes me crazy is when movie reality gets a little too far from reality reality.
First off, shooting a handgun inside a house, every single person in that room would be on the ground, writhing in pain, with their eardrums ringing and/or damaged.
Second, the flinch that avoids a bullet after a gun is fired.
In track, if you react faster than one-tenth of a second to the starter pistol, it’s a false start, because human reaction time is at best one-tenth of a second. Meaning someone would have to fire a gun from the other end of a football field for you to have any chance to react before that bullet was already past you—or through you.
Now, I know movies aren’t real, and we suspend disbelief all the time. But every once in a while, I like to throw in a moment where reality reality comes crashing down on movie reality, usually for comic effect.
And while we’re on this, you can’t launch a car twenty or thirty feet into the air and then land and, number one, have the car work, and number two, have your body work, because your internal organs would stretch to the point of failure.
I’d rather see a real moment where someone does something far less spectacular but gives us, in the audience, a terrifying sense of the true danger these people are in.
When physics don’t matter, when someone firing a Gatling gun at the hero misses with stormtrooper bad aim, while the hero takes them out with one shot from their very last bullet, it might be funny to make fun of.
But in the moment, it can take you out of the moment.
So, be as creative as you want. But every once in a while, give reality a chance.
More later…