Insulting Our Intelligence

I can't stand it when movie makers just assume that the audience is stupid. That they can cheat on the details and "no one will care." Uh, yes we will. It's a terrible sin for a storyteller to commit. It jars the audience out of the story and you might lose them right there.

A good [bad?] example of this is the upcoming movie Stealth. Even the trailers show multiple examples of ridiculous, eye-rolling absurdities. Eric Adams, of Popular Science, reviews this movie's glaring mistakes and I really like his assessment:

There are three reasons why filmmakers distort science and technology: 1) to make things look cooler, 2) to make a story work, and 3) because they have no clue what they’re talking about, and they’ve chosen to ignore the advice (or pleas) of the film’s consultants. Although Stealth, a hypersonically paced Top Gun update about an unmanned air combat vehicle (UCAV) gone amok, gets correct some of the futuristic air-combat technology it depicts, much of it is dead wrong, and the film commits all three of the aforementioned sins.

It a short but good read. Here the whole article.