What tropes in science fiction annoy you?

[Owain Taggart]

When this happens when I'm watching a DVD, I can usually get around it by setting my player's audio to Mono. It doesn't always work, particularly with newer movies and shows but it does on older stuff.

I suspect it maybe has something to do with (maybe?) changing standards on sound channel use. They might be used a bit differently than they used to, and there's so much more being done with sound, with a lot of it being a lot busier.

Plus 2009 Black Holes have two distinct modes, in one they crush you like a bug, in the other, they make you time travel totally undamaged. These modes are determined solely by plot convenience.

Oh god yes, I hate that as well. Along similar lines I thought it was quite hilarious how the supernova was treated in Trek 09.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Oh god yes, I hate that as well. Along similar lines I thought it was quite hilarious how the supernova was treated in Trek 09.

Yes! Even if you reasonably accept "Okay, it's just a sci-fi movie. Sure, a fictional supernova can have ejecta that can travel faster than the speed of light." But if you accept that bending of logic, then it doesn't make sense that Spock Prime's red matter would have any useful effect because the artificial black holes were only seen to be planet-size, not interstellar distance size! That would be like freezing a beehive in a block of ice after a bunch of angry bees have already escaped!

The damn writers defeated themselves!

 

[stj]

I resent that the 2009 Star Trek movie depicted (artificial) black holes as looking like colossal DVD discs. Isn't it obvious to anyone that if black holes are the ultimate manifestation of gravity, then they should be perfect spheres???

Yes, but they would also be invisible since no light can escape from them. It's supposed to be the accretion disk that is visible as spaghettification* by tidal forces heats infalling matter to incandescence. It is angular momentum that is supposed to produce the disk.

*the technical term, if I understand correctly

 

[Owain Taggart]

Yes! Even if you reasonably accept "Okay, it's just a sci-fi movie. Sure, a fictional supernova can have ejecta that can travel faster than the speed of light."

And that's not even taking into account that supernovas take many centuries to develop. They act as if it appeared instantly, but in reality Romulan astronomers (I'm assuming they have astronomers) would have been able to observe the star over a very large period of time and would have had plenty of time to formulate a plan of escape, if that was even a danger to them.

 

[suarezguy]

Plus 2009 Black Holes have two distinct modes, in one they crush you like a bug, in the other, they make you time travel totally undamaged. These modes are determined solely by plot convenience.

Or maybe Vulcan actually did go back in time too though we didn't see where and when it came out.

 

[Discofan]

Yes, but they would also be invisible since no light can escape from them. It's supposed to be the accretion disk that is visible as spaghettification* by tidal forces heats infalling matter to incandescence. It is angular momentum that is supposed to produce the disk.

*the technical term, if I understand correctly

Plus as Hawking used to say, Black holes have terrible table manners, whenever something falls into them, there's about thirty percent that's rejected, in the form of x-ray, which is the reason why we can see them, as x-ray emitters. Of course, it all depends on how much matter falls into the BH at any given time, some Bhs are nearly invisible, like the one at the center of the galaxy.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Tech that looks cool but how practical would it be?

Watching Paycheck and at the start of the movie they had a PC screen that had a woman's face sticking out of the screen in a sort of 3D render that looked like solid light. How practical would such a screen be, and yes it looked cool but would you really want that?

 

[Nerys Myk]

Hell, how did we manage to make movies with people of all nationalities in them without a UT?

We had them speak in the language of the viewer or used subtitles. Sometimes both.

 

[Greg Cox]

We had them speak in the language of the viewer or used subtitles. Sometimes both.

One amusing example was a JOAN OF ARC miniseries from several years back. The English bad guys spoke with British accents, while the French heroes also spoke English--but with American accents!

Somebody probably figured that only way you could get American TV viewers to root for the French against the English was to have all the French characters played by Americans!

(And no way was that same audience going to sit through four hours of subtitled French.)

 

[Discofan]

Data could make a connection with the computer that would be about a billion times faster than speech or keyboard typing... It makes no sense to have him type KB no matter how "fast" or ask questions of the computer.

It makes even less sense to have the Doctor interact that way since he's a PROGRAM INSIDE THE COMPUTER!! Making him ask questions of it is just idiotic.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Data could make a connection with the computer that would be about a billion times faster than speech or keyboard typing... It makes no sense to have him type KB no matter how "fast" or ask questions of the computer.

It makes even less sense to have the Doctor interact that way since he's a PROGRAM INSIDE THE COMPUTER!! Making him ask questions of it is just idiotic.

All very valid points but if we did that there would be no show.

 

[Greg Cox]

Authors in movies kept using typewriters long after this ceased to be realistic. A friend of mine theorized that this was because it was much more visually dramatic to show a frustrated writer throwing a crumpled piece of paper to the ground, possibly to join many other discarded pages strewn all over the floor, then to simply have them backspace or hit "DELETE.:

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

One amusing example was a JOAN OF ARC miniseries from several years back. The English bad guys spoke with British accents, while the French heroes also spoke English--but with American accents!

Somebody probably figured that only way you could get American TV viewers to root for the French against the English was to have all the French characters played by Americans!

(And no way was that same audience going to sit through four hours of subtitled French.)

That reminds me, is Rogue One the first SW movie where any member of the Rebel Alliance speaks with a British accent? The originals seemed to imply that Brit accents were only for Imperials and that Rebels spoke American (resulting in either a flat-out overdub, like Denis Lawson, or UK actors making awkward attempts at US accents).

As for black holes: ST09 was the pinnacle of realism compared to, say, the 1979 movie. Now THAT was comical. Not just because of the black hole looking like a giant storm drain in space, but the total abandonment of anything resembling scientific accuracy in the final scenes.

(And I always thought it was very ironic that a DISNEY film, of all things, was the one to literally show the bad guy end up in hell.)

 

[Nerys Myk]

That reminds me, is Rogue One the first SW movie where any member of the Rebel Alliance speaks with a British accent? The originals seemed to imply that Brit accents were only for Imperials and that Rebels spoke American (resulting in either a flat-out overdub, like Denis Lawson, or UK actors making awkward attempts at US accents).

Leia is briefly faux-British in ANH.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Leia is briefly faux-British in ANH.

As was Spock in "The Cage" (CAHN'T be the screen, then).

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Leia is briefly faux-British in ANH.

But she only does that when she's playing her role as Senator, I believe, IOW while "in disguise."

---

I think Mon Mothma has some sort of Commonwealth accent in Return of the Jedi, though I couldn't say exactly what it is. The actress who plays her is Caroline Blakiston, who is English, born in Chelsea, London, England, sez Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Blakiston

edit - But Mon Mothma was also an ex-Senator, interestingly.

 

[GNDN18]

As was Spock in "The Cage" (CAHN'T be the screen, then).

Ah circuits are beginning to heat! We’ll have to cease pow-AH!

 

[Nerys Myk]

As was Spock in "The Cage" (CAHN'T be the screen, then).

Ah circuits are beginning to heat! We’ll have to cease pow-AH!

Well Nimoy was from Boston .
Imagine Spock with a full on Boston accent

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Imagine Spock with a full on Boston accent

Instead of "Fascinating", he'd say "Wicked Pissah".

 

[Discofan]

One amusing example was a JOAN OF ARC miniseries from several years back. The English bad guys spoke with British accents, while the French heroes also spoke English--but with American accents!

Somebody probably figured that only way you could get American TV viewers to root for the French against the English was to have all the French characters played by Americans!

(And no way was that same audience going to sit through four hours of subtitled French.)

The thing is that if we were to be true to history:

1) The English spoke French back then.

2) The French language has changed a lot since that time and would be almost completely incomprehensible to the French viewers themselves and so it would have to be subtitled to the French audience as well.