We were walking out of Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Graham turned to look at me. “How were there still dinosaurs there if it gets to almost boiling all the time?”
Now, I had spotted about ten or fifteen science errors that had made me twitch over the course of the movie, but that happens. All the time. Not just science, either. Science and art and history and all kinds of things. And if I’m not sure, I go look it up in the hopes of being pleasantly surprised. (I’m usually not.) But Graham? He’s pretty easy-going about these things, and if he notices the problem, especially enough to comment on it—especially enough to comment on it to me and risk the torrent of Everything The Movie Got Wrong—whatever they screwed up must be pretty irreparable.
The term is “willing suspension of disbelief,” known in certain circles as “just turn off your brain and enjoy the movie, man.” Or, as a long-ago ex of mine phrased it, every movie is allowed one great impossibility. Okay, so we all know the Earth isn’t hollow, and a journey to the actual center of it would kill you, kill you dead, long before you got there, because heat, pressure, and so forth. But by going to see the movie, we’ve all agree to pretend that it isn’t true for a couple of hours and go along with the premise. The problem comes when the movie doesn’t meet us halfway.
I believe it’s in Danse Macabre that Stephen King discusses the concept, including talking about how that suspension gets harder and harder as you get older. And that’s certainly true. Though goodness knows I was never young enough to accept an idea or two of his while still being old enough to read the book it was in. Or something like that, anyway. But this goes beyond that. This is where you’re in the story, and then suddenly, you’re not, because come on. Really?
Sometimes, it’s a little moment, and you can get back in pretty quickly. Ever After always gets me in the moment where Leonardo da Vinci unrolls the Mona Lisa, because in real life, it’s painted on wood and doesn’t roll so well. And I think I’ve known that since I was a child reading Two-Minute Mysteries, because I’m pretty sure that was the solution to one of them. But okay, whatever, Mona Lisa, moving on. I accept the rest of the ridiculousness of the story, though it amused the hell out of me when I realized that the prince Drew Barrymore hopes to marry actually married Catherine de Medici, because wow. But sure, fantasy.
Sometimes, though, you’re just done. The example being battled out these days is Lucy and the ten percent of the brain myth. I can’t get beyond that enough to want to watch the movie, I’m afraid. I’ve heard it used as a justification for one too many stupid stories. It’s lazy storytelling, and I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it. There are plenty of other completely BS explanations they could have used that I would have accepted for a couple of hours; I’m just burned out on that one.
The reason that ex of mine and I even had the conversation was that we’d just gotten out of Face/Off, you see. We were talking about the huge list of impossibilities therein. Okay, so we were voluntarily watching a movie wherein John Travolta and Nicolas Cage change faces and fool everyone. This, I admit. I also spent longer than I like talking him down, because we were voluntarily doing this despite some weird childhood trauma he had about people without faces because of an episode of The Six-Million Dollar Man. In short, this was a movie we should not have gone to see. But the movie kept getting sillier and sillier as we went on, and I just couldn’t keep my disbelief up.
This was the problem a lot of people had with Prometheus, too. You can pick a lot of that movie to pieces, but let’s talk about how the biologist is kind of poking the alien creature he doesn’t know anything about. Or not. Certainly no movie post-Galaxy Quest should have characters just take their masks off and breathe the air of an alien planet, because too many of us have Guy Fleegman yelling in our heads. Even if the balances of gases are right, there’s the War of the Worlds scenario. You don’t want to risk it.
It’s one of the reasons for diminishing returns of a lot of action movie franchises, I think. It gets less and less probable that Our Hero will fight off terrorists even if that’s technically his job and certainly not if it isn’t his job. When the shark is coming after the widow of the man who killed it in the first movie, is there a better place to start punning on the phrase “jump the shark”? People having flashbacks to things they didn’t see is problematic and common. And of course, there’s the belief that you have to keep topping the previous movie, so the death machines used to try to kill James Bond reached truly Rube Goldbergian proportions. No wonder Scott Evil wanted to just go get a gun.
No one who likes superhero movies as much as I do is completely incapable of suspending disbelief. I not only believe a man can fly, I believe he can go back in time and withstand the Nagasaki bombing. (In different movies, of course.) But when said man starts having battles on top of moving bullet trains where everyone manages to stab the top long enough to keep fighting unless it’s part of the choreography for them to be elsewhere now, well, I can’t quite believe that. From the reviews, neither could anyone else.