Is Reality Important?

Rating: Null/10 (27 November 1998)

To those who whine that this is fiction and doesn't need to be realistic (the "check your brain at the door" crowd), some of us enjoy a film more when we can lose ourselves in it. When a movie is unrealistic, it snaps me out of my immersion and reminds me that I'm sitting in a theater watching someone's poor effort at making me believe that I'm watching something more exciting than my mundane life. Spaceships which are basically immune to meteors and debris, survivors of a 22000 MPH crash, gravity and atmosphere that shouldn't exist -- all these things jump out at me as preposterous and destroy the illusion. Just take something with which you are very familiar and imagine a movie where it is totally misrepresented and tell me that it wouldn't bother you. For example, imagine a movie in which a car is stranded in the desert and the hero cannot figure out how to start it again. Then s/he solves the problem by squeezing sand to produce water which s/he puts in the tank and the car is drivable again. If you could come out of that movie and say that you didn't feel cheated on the solution to the problem, then you amaze me. I find this a frequent problem in many stories/screenplays. The author creates a good problem but then cannot come up with a good solution. Or maybe the director discards the "realistic" solution for a simpler Hollywood solution.