this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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Whether intentionally or not, what do movies depict or present wrong a lot of the time?

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[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Getting hit on the head and staying unconscious for an extended period of time.

No... No that's not how that shit works. If you're hit on the head so hard that you are lying on the ground limp, you're either dead, dying, or have received sever brain damage.

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[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 31 points 4 days ago (4 children)

How big a house an average person can afford.

[–] SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Another version of this - how big an apartment/house an artist can afford.

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[–] derek@infosec.pub 97 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

The relaxed position of mammalian eyelids leaves them open. Muscles must contract for the eyes to be shut. Dead creatures cannot contract their muscles so their eyes remain open after they die.

You cannot shut their eyes for them by closing their eyes with your hand. Morticians place contacts in cadaver's eyes while preparing the body for a wake. Those contacts grip the inside of the eyelids so that they remain closed.

This is why some cultures have funerary traditions in which objects are placed over the eyes.

TL;DR: you and your loved ones won't close their eyes when they die.

[–] FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 31 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is a really big one. I have to revise all of my heroic self insert fantasies where i cover up a dead person's eyes

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 51 points 5 days ago (10 children)
[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 11 points 4 days ago

Imagine an evil terrorist organization coming into the picture, and it's up to REAL COPS to stop them.

And like real cops, they end up taking a detour to Walmart, where a woman was accused of stealing so they pull out their guns and kill a baby.

Oh is this too real? My bad.

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[–] radiofreebc@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago

The good guy winning.

[–] Medic8eme@piefed.ca 21 points 4 days ago

Getting knocked unconscious.

[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 70 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Loudness of gunshots. Every action hero would be deaf.

Archers being told to "hold". Nobody's holding a +100lbs warbow.

Sprinklers. In the vast majority of cases they react to heat - not smoke. They only go off individually rather than all at once and the water inside the pipes is black ink-like rust water sludge, not clear tap water.

Also another plumbing related: you don't need a huge wrench under the sink and drains are not pressurized so there's no water spraying anywhere when you mess with the p-trap.

[–] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 35 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Also archers being told to "fire"

as firing didn't exist until gunpowder, the instruction wouldn't make sense. Like telling a soldier now to "activate the positronic tacyons!" instead of "fire"

[–] NABDad@lemmy.world 26 points 5 days ago
[–] insaneinthemembrane@lemmy.world 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Romantic relationships. Way too much stalking and abuse of power. Far too many very large age gaps. All that stuff.

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[–] kossa@feddit.org 25 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Running over a cliff and only start to fall once realizing that you just ran over a cliff.

That's not real, you fall immediately.

[–] FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Have you ever tried?? I think it could be real

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[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 55 points 5 days ago (5 children)

Sex and relationships in action movies.

The whole "hot chick gets horny for the hero after a traumatizing couple of hours" thing gives a pretty messed up view of relationship building.

[–] Okokimup@lemmy.world 20 points 5 days ago

Or as comedian Kyle Kincaid said, the idea that the action hero could still get it up.

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[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 21 points 4 days ago (5 children)

the classic : no cleanup after sex

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 4 days ago

Also how everyone is like wrapping their entire body up in sheets to get up from the bed. As if they weren't literally just fucking lol

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[–] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

Hacking/computer programming. They type wildly fast while shouting things.

Most of it looks like this but infront of a monitor, scrolling the wheel occasionally.

[–] MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Giving birth. In movies and TV shows it's always this sudden thing. Like "My water broke! The baby is coming!" then there is some pushing and screaming and bam, baby. In reality, having a baby takes many many hours and often times days, even with induced labor.

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[–] SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world 25 points 5 days ago (3 children)
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[–] FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca 28 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Movies and shows about legal disputes rarely show how long and dragged out they usually are

[–] LORDSMEGMA@sh.itjust.works 18 points 5 days ago

Imagine being stuck in a theater for 6 years

[–] eezeebee@lemmy.ca 44 points 5 days ago (5 children)

Telephone etiquette. They just start yapping and then hang up without saying goodbye.

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 44 points 5 days ago (14 children)

Hacking.
tap tap tap I'm in.
Honourable mention is NCIS Dual keyboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ

[–] tal@lemmy.today 22 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Years back, I remember watching the Wargames scene where the computer was trying to "guess a passcode". Which it was doing remotely. Determining one digit at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNBdjVO04Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qOV8xonfY

I said, "This is completely ridiculous. That's not how any kind of real world authentication system works." Dramatic, yes. Realistic? No, never happen.

Some years later, there was a severe remote exploit for the filesharing feature for Windows 95 and 98 systems. Not only had the Microsoft person who designed the thing stored the password to a share in plaintext instead of hashing it, which would have precluded this from working, but there was also a bug where the server's authentication system could be sent a malformed message and only validated as many bytes of the password as had been specified in the authentication message. Someone promptly went out and wrote an exploit to brute-force access to a share by just asking it to only validate the first byte, try each, get in in at most 256 tries. I look at that and say "yeah, but it also exposes the next byte of the password itself, and those probably persist even after the thing is patched, not to mention the potential for credentials reuse for other things". I go modify Samba's smbclient to iterate through the thing, extract the password one byte at a time. I message a buddy who has a Windows 98 machine on the network, "hey, can I break into your machine for a sec?" He comes up "Uh, okay. What are you up to, tal?"

I fire it up and we're sitting there watching his password be printed on my Linux box's screen, one letter at a time. I said, "This is exactly like that scene in Wargames that I said could never, ever happen in real life, was just Hollywood. Guess that showed me." He says, "fucking Microsoft".

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[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 26 points 5 days ago (22 children)

Distances in space.

Everything is further away that you can possibly imagine.

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[–] MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How heavy a full cup of coffee feels. The actors always treat it like the cup is empty. Liars!

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 11 points 4 days ago

This goes for ANY container. I mostly notice empty suitcases.

[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

In anti-authoritarian movies, they don't go beyond what happens after the revolution or "the day after" as Slavoj Zizek always say. Unfortunately in real life, post-revolutions do not always lead to a happy ending. Just ask most of post-colonial states. Only a handful succeed and become prosperous and secure.

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[–] Griffus@lemmy.zip 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)
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[–] SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 30 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Most dishonest about? Hard to say, since movies are dishonest about virtually everything. (As escapism, that's what we want.) But a big one that comes to mind is proceedings in courts of law.

In real life, a court case is excruciatingly procedural, spread out over months of correspondence and brief hearings, and the vast majority of them never go to trial. And for the few that do go to trial, there are never any intense, witness-stand confrontations, or inspiring speechifying by the plaintiff or defendant. No attorneys shouting, "OBJECTION!", across the room.

I know of two friends of a friend, one of whom signed a reverse mortgage on his house with some scammers who promised that he could live the rest of his life there, but then who turned around and filed to evict him. Clearly influenced by dramatic courtroom scenes in TV and movies, he seemed to think that "court" meant that he would be able to show up and give the judge a moving soliloquy about being a righteous, disabled veteran, and prevail. The judge did his level best to help the guy out by almost insisting on appointing a guardian ad litem (free attorney!), but he refused. (Sadly, he died before it went to trial, and the scammers kept the house.)

The other one got sued by a credit card company over a charge that was obviously bogus (i.e. from a swimming pool contractor in eastern Europe, which is just who you'd call in the midwestern U.S.), but they had the same mental script: Show up in the courtroom and speechify to the judge. They didn't even respond to the summons and complaint, and the company won by default judgement.

It's maddening.

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[–] SimpleMachine@sh.itjust.works 20 points 5 days ago (7 children)

Suppressed weapons. Shit is still loud, anyone anywhere near it will hear it. Also, when a bullet hits a person or any other surface the impact sound is loud as well.

Hitting people with beer bottles. You take a beer bottle to the head and you're probably done for.

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[–] cRazi_man@europe.pub 20 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

Getting knocked out for a length of time after being hit on the head is likely going to cause pretty significant brain injury or death.

CPR is so hilariously bad and completely against what is taught in even first aid classes. This includes hospital based medical dramas.

If a man and woman consume alcohol, there's an 80% chance that it's about to transition into a sex scene.

Explosions release a crazy amount of fire. In reality explosions are violently expanding gases with almost no flame seen.

Poverty is rarely ever shown accurately. Malcolm in the MIddle was a good example though.

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[–] Lor@mander.xyz 8 points 4 days ago

The fight scenes, most people would die. In the movies they walk away.

[–] SelfHigh5@lemmy.world 12 points 4 days ago

Memory loss/amnesia. It works as a plot device but how often it shows up in media makes it seem like, well that’s what happens when you get bonked on the head. Amnesia is actually pretty rare. CPR/shocking: I was so grateful that Dr. Robby called this out on The Pitt, you can’t shock asystole (flatline). Well, you can but it’s good for fuck all. I get why CPR is done poorly, if you do it for real you’re probably gonna break ribs. But they could do it as fast as it’s supposed to go at least. The dramatic pushes 3 seconds apart is also good for fuck all.

[–] MelonYellow@lemmy.ca 25 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (6 children)

Pulling people out of a burning building. In reality the smoke and fire is so bad, you ain’t seeing shit, not like the clear visibility like they show in the movies. And I spoke to a firefighter who’d been doing it for 35 years. He said he responded to thousands of burning buildings and the number of times anyone’s been saved out of a burning building? Exactly zero. That always stuck with me.

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[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Guy gets shot and the impact sends him flying across the room, out the window, etc. Physics says “oh hell no”. The guy who fired that shot would have likely had his arm dislocated from the recoil if he was able to even hold onto it.

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[–] fiendishplan@lemmy.world 20 points 5 days ago (1 children)

How easy it is to twist someones neck to kill them.

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 18 points 5 days ago (2 children)

How often real people have to go to the bathroom.

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[–] MuttMutt@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

Firearms in general.

Supressors as well. If two guys were walking through an airport shooting at each other everyone would still know it. Also a suppressor has a pop on the first shot.

If you have your firearm knowledge from movies and TV you don't know anything except what Hollywood wants you to think.

[–] thesohoriots@lemmy.world 22 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Millennials/gen Z with their phone sound on. I get it’s to fill otherwise blank space in the sound, but we’re not texting with the click-click-click-click.

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[–] jpreston2005@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

How comfortable people are dragging their nice clothes/long coats/shoes into water and mud. How many times you see a woman in a period piece with this long flowing dress, traipsing through a big muddy area and not even attempting to hold her dress up out of it. like, c'mon, man. People in movies just don't care about having wet socks I guess.

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[–] ChowJeeBai@lemmy.world 22 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Explosion and gun sounds in spaaaaceeee!

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