Home Entertainment Midweek Movie Mouth-off: movies, stick to your own rules!

Midweek Movie Mouth-off: movies, stick to your own rules!

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If a movie is going to ask to you suspend your disbelief and spend time setting up some specific rules for their cinematic universe, you should hope they’d have the decency to stick to them. After all, they’re the ones that established the rule set. Sadly though, consistency in universe building is not always the case.

The most egregious example I can think of is the 2012 movie Upside Down. If you haven’t seen it, take my word for it and don’t bother. The basic plot of Upside Down is there’s a dual planet system where the two planets are really super close to each other, with “dual gravity” that allows the planets to orbit each other. They spend a lot of time establishing how this “dual gravity” works, and they even have a narration in the beginning laying out three very specific, “immutable” rules as the movie calls them.

So what do they proceed to do throughout the rest of the film? Obviously, they break every single one of those rules, several times. The generic Romeo and Juliet style romance plot didn’t help, but I couldn’t even get angry at that. I was spending too much time yelling at the TV after they’d broken yet another one of their own damn laws.

I’m not even going to get into the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey sides of time travel movies like The Butterfly Effect or Looper. Time travel movies are probably the worst offenders in this category. Superhero movies are another big offender, take as many pinches of salt as you want but that tank key-chain in Ant-Man should have weighed several tons.

So, if you can think of a time when a movie asked you to suspend your disbelief, only to ruin it (and potentially the rest of the movie) by going against their own rules, I want to know. Which movie was it, and how pissed off did you get?

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Critical Hit as an organisation.

Last Updated: July 20, 2016

3 Comments

  1. Alien Emperor Trevor

    July 20, 2016 at 10:46

    There are so many movies that set up overpowered protags or antags who’re fantastic and perfect at everything they do… except for when it becomes inconvenient for the plot.

    The ace marksman suddenly turns into this…

    http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view3/3056346/police-squad-shootout-o.gif

    It drives me insane. It’s especially obvious when it involves some type of robot.

    Reply

    • Dane

      July 21, 2016 at 12:00

      100%
      Typically gunfights where auto-rifle equipped antags behind cover can’t compete with flat open pistol wielding protags. In every damn action movie.

      Reply

  2. elysium

    July 20, 2016 at 11:45

    The sixth(!?!) Alpha and Omega film, “Dino Digs”, really fucked me off with that badly.
    Okay, yeah, I’m a sucker for punishment for even having watched past the first one (it was a guilty pleasure, I’m afraid – I know it sucks, but I sorta liked it)… though they spend all that time establishing themselves as at least somewhat grounded in reality kinda, bar there being one film with a wolf ghost, which, okay, was bending the rules a bit considering there’d never been anything like that, but forgivable because it wasn’t that overtly done (and that one, number 4, The Legend of the Saw Tooth Cave was actually about the only decent sequel of the lot)… and then the sixth one comes along and suddenly dinosaurs are running around with the wolves.
    No explanation as to how they are (some crap about “the sunlight touching their dug up bones” or something), no reason for it to have happened, no explaining why they were able to or what was special about where they were buried, not ghosts a la the vague wolf spirit wind thing from #4, just… dinosaurs. Running around. Because. Oh, and they get hypnotized by a fountain that hypnotizes birds randomly. Clever evolution joke sorta, but another “just because” deus ex machnia. That whole movie was pretty much just because.
    Well at least A&O7 will be out just in time for me to feel like punishing myself yet again with viewership. At least that one seems more sane, being mostly about a blizzard which is an actual thing that wolves have to deal with in real life, unlike fucking DINOSAURS.
    I guess the moral of the story is: don’t watch DTV sequels to iffy animated movies. Or even DTV sequels to fairly decent ones. *glares at Land Before Time XIV. Fucking FOURTEEN.*
    Oh, being a fan of animation sucks quite often. Is it too early in the day to start drinking?

    Reply

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