Jump to content

A word for film makers/prop builders


Recommended Posts

Over in the F-111E armaments thread, I mentioned building props for filming, which reminded me of something.

If you are a film maker, and are ever thinking of representing ANY kind of bomb for something that is supposed to be serious. For goodness sakes, research the weapons before signing off on something. I can't tell you how much seeing "THE BOMB" in Steven King's The Stand pulled me right out of that story.

Having worked on "THE BOMB" (actual nukes, not the prop), this has been bugging me for decades.

Thank you

Edited by KTesh
Link to post
Share on other sites

Over in the F-111E armaments thread, I mentioned building props for filming, which reminded me of something.

If you are a film maker, and are ever thinking of representing ANY kind of bomb for something that is supposed to be serious. For goodness sakes, research the weapons before signing off on something. I can't tell you how much seeing "THE BOMB" in Steven King's The Stand pulled me right out of that story.

Having worked on "THE BOMB" (actual nukes, not the prop), this has been bugging me for decades.

Thank you

Don't think Hollywood really worries about sweating the details on stuff like that. Best looking nuke I've seen from them is this bad boy:

slim-pickens-rides-down-the-bombjpg-eaf7f81f163d7fc7_large_zpsskmvkrwo.jpg

Link to post
Share on other sites

You mean "a memo for film Computer graphics programmers/green screeners"

Most Hollywood weapons look hollywood. Even more so for nukes because they are "bad"

If you want some laughs, listen to the commentary track on The Sum of All Fears. Clancy just reams everything in the movie. Eventually the director just stops defending it and tries to ask questions instead

Link to post
Share on other sites

If you are a film maker, and are ever thinking of representing ANY kind of bomb for something that is supposed to be serious. For goodness sakes, research the weapons before signing off on something.

One problem is, as the Player King says in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, "Audiences know what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in". If the subject is real but is outside the normal experience of the viewer, they don't accept it easily. That's why the X-Wings flew like WWII aircraft in Star Wars - audiences "know" what dogfights look like (being educated on WWII movies), and won't readily accept a real space physics equivalent.

Link to post
Share on other sites

One problem is, as the Player King says in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, "Audiences know what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in". If the subject is real but is outside the normal experience of the viewer, they don't accept it easily. That's why the X-Wings flew like WWII aircraft in Star Wars - audiences "know" what dogfights look like (being educated on WWII movies), and won't readily accept a real space physics equivalent.

Exactly. That's also why terrorist bombs in movies all look like this;

x15F4sR.jpg

And not like this;

old-rafford-pipe-bomb-manchester-united.jpg

It's what the audience expects a bomb to look like.

Link to post
Share on other sites

That's not like any nuke I've ever seen on a B-52 or any other type of aircraft, and you sure don't write personal messages on them.

It's the real deal bud. Pretty sure I saw it in a movie.

Link to post
Share on other sites

Wait...

It was the shape of the bomb shown in the last 45 seconds of that movie that broke your suspension of disbelief while watching? You were perfectly okay with a flu that wiped out most of humanity. You were okay with some deity channelling his/her wishes through an old lady in a rocking chair. And you were okay with the physical hand of that same deity coming down from on-high and flicking the switch. But the shape of the bomb itself was totally unexceptable?

Given all that, and the fact it was a very low budget 90s TV movie which they probably had better things to spend their resources on than building a replica of an actual A-bomb, I find this very odd.

Link to post
Share on other sites

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic

Reality is unrealistic^

The film To Hell and Back was a movie about World War II badass Audie Murphy, played by himself. The climax of the film involves Murphy saving his squad by climbing atop a burning tank destroyer and holding off German soldiers alone with the mounted machine gun. Over the top, right? Yes, but he really did that, and he was awarded the Medal of Honor for it. In fact, the film had to scale back some of his war stories because they would be too unbelievable to the viewer.
The government's technology in Enemy of the State is actually ten years behind what the US government had in store at the time the movie came out in 1998. This was done on purpose, both for the benefit of the writer and the viewer.

this classic:

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.

Edited by TaiidanTomcat
Link to post
Share on other sites

If you want some laughs, listen to the commentary track on The Sum of All Fears. Clancy just reams everything in the movie. Eventually the director just stops defending it and tries to ask questions instead

Seriously... it's a good drinking game. Take a shot every time Clancy says "that's bullshit." You'll be hammered before the changeover to all-English.

Link to post
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...