Ridiculous and Implausible Plot Ploys in Major Motion Pictures

Ridiculous and implausible are relative terms. Plot devices that would seem preposterous in a serious drama may be quite plausible in an outrageous comedy such as The Pink Panther or Get Smart. Even within a genre or specific film franchise, audience expectations can vary tremendously from one film to another. What seems realistic for Roger Moore’s James Bond may be entirely inappropriate for Daniel Craig. Similarly, Christian Bale’s Batman exists in a much grittier world than those occupied by Michael Keaton and Adam West. 

Audiences want escapist entertainment about vampires, talking horses, colleges where cheerleaders choose geeky nerds over jocks and comic book worlds where strange visitors from distant galaxies and photojournalists bitten by radioactive spiders can soar above skyscrapers – but not all in the same film.

Movies rely upon the willful suspension of disbelief by the audience. The filmmaker can create a fanciful world populated by fantastic characters, but must also stay within boundaries established early in the first act. The boundaries are fuzzy, varying greatly with the genre and tone of the film; the filmmakers’ skill at capturing and holding our attention; the audience’s current social, political and technological environment; and the knowledge and sophistication of individual viewers. 

Various authors have attempted to delineate rules to define the boundaries between fantasy and reality, notably Robert McKee, Neill D. Hicks (cosmos of reality) and Blake Snyder (double mumbo-jumbo). Films that stay within credible boundaries hold the audience’s attention from beginning to end. But the slightest breach can break the spell, leaving the audience confused and intensely aware they are watching a movie.

The following is my compilation of ridiculous and implausible plot ploys from recent motion pictures. I am not a man of science; however, I have researched a wide variety of topics for my own scripts and offer these insights as those of a reasonably educated person. If I am mistaken, I welcome comments, corrections and criticisms.

Die Another Day

DNA replacement therapy

Movies do not need to be technologically precise. Nobody wants to see a film based on some obtuse, erudite dissertation published in Scientific American or Journal of the American Medical Association. But for the emotional content of a film to be credible, the risks and rewards must be realistic. A stranger poking  a pen in your back on a subway train would be much more disconcerting if he whispered he has a gun pointed at your spine than if he claimed to hold a death ray. A credible threat evokes a credible response.

Screenwriters often draw inspiration from emerging technologies. The robotics in 1984’s The Terminator and the tracking device in 1964’s Goldfinger seem far less futuristic today than when the films were released. Surgeons are now performing partial face transplants, although not with the facility seen in 1997’s Face/Off, and are developing nanobots, or microscopic robots, which may one day be injected into patients, much like the submarine in 1966’s Fantastic Voyage, although without Raquel Welch onboard.

Even so, the notion of re-engineering an individual’s complete DNA makeup, to the extent of revamping physical features while retaining memories and skills, seems absolutely ridiculous, and even more so when a sleazy megalomaniac attempts to explain how they first wipe the DNA slate clean by destroying the patient’s bone marrow.  [In fairness, bone marrow transplants can cause the patient’s blood type to change, so there is the slightest glimmer of truth here.]

Die Another Day had a lot going for it and I would rank it among the top ten of the first twenty MGM Bond films, but this cheesy plot element did not work at all.

Wanted

Sniper rifle inspired by unrestrained penis envy

In the opening scene to Wanted, a sniper fires an elaborate sabot projectile through a rifle that has a barrel only slightly shorter than your typical particle accelerator.

Wanted is an adaptation of a comic book and retains the stylized, distorted reality of similarly inspired films like Sin City, Hellboy, Men in Black and Spiderman. It is a fun, action-packed movie and I was along for the ride, even when they were shooting curve balls with bullets. But the sniper rifle seemed over-the-top, even within the exaggerated landscape of the film.

Adding an inch or two to the barrel of a firearm will typically increase muzzle velocity and accuracy because the expanding gasses from the powder confined in the barrel will give the projectile a little more push and the longer barrel will add a little more spin.

But there is a limit to the advantages that can be achieved by lengthening the barrel. The bullet starts out slightly larger than the barrel diameter, like the cork in a bottle of Champagne, so there is a fair amount of friction between the bullet and the wall of the barrel. Doubling the length of the barrel halves the pressure of the gasses. Eventually you would reach a point where the resistance from the friction and weight of the bullet equals the pressure of the gasses and the bullet would become stuck in the barrel.

If we increase the length of the barrel twenty fold, we would need something like twenty times as much powder, which is analogous to firing artillery shells through a sniper rifle and something is bound to blow, if the recoil doesn’t kill the sniper.

Playing by Heart

Let’s kiss until our lips bleed.

Films need emotional veracity even more than technical accuracy. This film missed the mark on both counts, at least in the Angelina Jolie – Ryan Phillippe storyline.

Public health officials assure us it is nearly impossible to contract HIV through casual kissing, but I don’t believe it. More accurately, I believe it on an intellectual level, but not on an emotional level.

Scientists have detected HIV virus in saliva, but haven’t been able to grow a culture from it. But swabbing a cheek isn’t the same as swapping spit. They haven’t identified any infections they can trace to kissing, but I’m not reassured. How many new HIV infections have been transmitted by people who engaged in sex without first kissing? Who’s to say the runner wasn’t already infected by a kiss by the time he reached home base?

In the film, Angelina becomes intrigued by Ryan, but he’s a bit distant. She finally learns he contracted HIV from a girlfriend who was an intravenous drug user. But their mutual attraction is so strong they decide that, even though they can’t have sex without her risking infection, they can still kiss until their lips bleed. [They don’t actually say the last part about bleeding lips, but if I had a girlfriend who drew the line at kissing, but was eager and talented in that department, I’d certainly kiss her quite a lot. But not if she was HIV-positive.]

Unfortunately, public health officials cannot explain every case of HIV and AIDS. Most cases can be traced to high-risk behavior, such as unprotected sex, and they can often match strains to provide some assurance that they have found the most likely source of the infection. But a few cases baffle the experts. They can identify the source of infection, but not the means of transmission because there was no sexual contact. A study of couples who practiced safe sex after one partner was infected found that twenty-percent of the unaffected partners developed HIV within six months. These are people who supposedly used condoms religiously because they knew there was a very real and present danger.  

Playing by Heart misses the mark both factually and emotionally. I can’t believe anybody would willfully enter into a new relationship with an HIV-positive partner that involved marathon soulful kissing and I can’t believe that anybody would consider it safe to have frequent intimate contact with an HIV positive partner, even absent sexual intercourse.

Capricorn One

Implausible secret conspiracy

Can anything be more frustrating to aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers than seeing so much talent and money wasted on a ridiculous film?

Talk about being in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time or whatever. I wasn’t there, but apparently Warner Bros. found themselves in a bind regarding their 1978 summer release schedule. Superman: The Movie was behind schedule and, like the belligerently myopic NASA administrators in Capricorn One, they decided to follow their original plan blindly, so gave a second-rate B-movie a full-court press.

NASA is under pressure to perform to prove to an apathetic nation that they can get the job done, but their multi-billion dollar mission to Mars is jeopardized by a faulty life support system that is expected to fail before the astronauts reach the planet, killing everybody on board.

They could delay the mission, demand the subcontractor fix their faulty system or take their lumps and spend twenty millions or whatever to retrofit a new life-support system, but no. Instead they decide to fake the mission and whisk the astronauts off to a soundstage where they are compelled to make fake broadcasts reporting mission progress. Meanwhile, the spacecraft is shot into space empty.

Some months later, the astronauts realize they can’t be allowed to live to tell their tales, so they escape, only to be hunted down by unidentified mercenaries in helicopters equipped with machine guns that can’t seem to out-maneuver a World War I plane retrofitted as a crop duster.

But if NASA is dumb enough to think this plan will succeed, how did they figure out the life-support system would fail? And if they’re ruthless enough to murder a mission control geek who becomes suspicious and try to kill a reporter (and presumably kill the caterer and janitor and guards at the secret studio), why are they too timid to demand a refund from the subcontractor?

A pet peeve is the plot device of using hordes of faceless mercenaries-slash-cannon-fodder to provide a seeming insurmountable third-act obstacle. Where do they find these guys? Can NASA order up some armed forces secret ops unit to do their dirty work? Or does NASA have helicopters equipped with machine guns? Mr. & Mrs. Smith went over the top, but at least they created a backdrop where assassination was big business. Other films like The Replacement Killers, Absolute Power, Lucky Number Sleven and Bangkok Dangerous give the assassins emotional depth. But how are we supposed to believe NASA can hire mercenaries willing to hunt down and murder American astronauts (read “heroes”) and operate sorties over southern California with gun ships without arousing the attention of our Air Force, the FAA or law enforcement?

Transformers

Dynamics of helicopter flight

I didn’t expect much from Transformers and didn’t get around to watching it until a year after its release, but it was a fun movie. It had its problems. Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox (both 22 in reality) were way too old for the sixteen-year-olds they played. Shia might pass for eighteen, but Megan looks her age or a little older. The Transformers managed to violate just about all of Newton’s principles of physics, particularly the one concerning conservation of mass and momentum. And the decision by the Camaro transformer seemed hollow.

But well-made movies have a momentum that carries them past minor incongruities in plot and physical improbabilities in action. And this one had a lot of momentum, until the final scene when a convoy of helicopters carried the fallen Decepticons over the ocean. In this slow-moving scene, one notices one huge robot suspended between two cargo helicopters.  

I’ve never seen this in practice and there is a good reason. The only reason to carry a load between two helicopters would be that one isn’t powerful enough to carry the weight. But a very heavy weight suspended between two helicopters will exert a downward force that will pull the two aircraft together so they collide with one another. Even if the pilots were foolish enough to attempt it, they would need to expend much of the helicopters’ power flying away from one another to avoid collision, which means the power isn’t available for forward flight, so there’s little advantage to having two birds.

The Saint

Chain Reaction

Cold Fusion

When something sounds too good to be true, it generally isn’t. Sadly, this seems to be the case with cold fusion, regarded by most as an example of pathological science, which is the politically correct term for crackpot. 

In the 1980s, two scientists at the University of Utah designed an experiment using palladium and heavy water. They built some sort of experimental contraption and ran it for week after week after week. Eventually, something broke down and their contraption overheated slightly. Ignoring Occham’s Razor, the scientists concluded they had somehow caused an implausible nuclear reaction.

Their announcement caused a media stir and a lot of scientists spent a lot of time and money (that could have been better spent elsewhere) investigating their claims, but nobody could get it to work.

As a plot device, this might have worked in a 1960s spy spoof with Derek Flint or Matt Helm pursuing comically megalomaniacal arch villains, but not in a 1990 film that tries to take its subject matter seriously. The screenwriters of The Saint may have betrayed a subconscious ambivalence toward the subject matter in making Dr. Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue) a bit of a scatterbrain.