“6 Things Movie Characters Always Seem to Forget”
This is pretty funny from Cracked:
The one thing you always have to remember about characters in a movie is that they don’t know they’re characters in a movie. But sometimes they seem to forget things from one episode or scene to the next that makes us think they have some kind of brain injury that has ruined their short-term memory.
Not sure what we mean? Well, we’re talking about things like…
One example:
#6.Insisting That The Paranormal Doesn’t Exist (Despite Dealing With It Daily)
The victims: Ghostbusters II, Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, X-Files, Fringe
It makes perfect sense for the characters in a vampire or zombie movie to need some time to adjust to the idea that they’re being attacked by vampires or zombies. We don’t even mind that there’s always that one character who remains in denial until the second act (aka Carl Weathers in Predator insisting their nemesis was “just some guys in camouflage”).
Death, courtesy of your local Army/Navy store.
But then you have a character in a series that deals exclusively with the supernatural, who completely forgets from one episode to the next that they are in fact characters in a series dealing with the supernatural. Take Indiana Jones, so quickly dismissing the idea of psychic alien skulls in the fourth movie, in spite of having witnessed firsthand the supernatural powers of the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail and Indian spirit rocks. Pretty much every artifact the man digs up has magical powers, this should not be new territory for him.
“Swamp gas.”
But that’s nothing compared to the X-files and Fringe, two shows with skeptical characters who seem to never manage to learn anything from their numerous encounters with Halloween beasts. Here’s how basically every episode goes:
Agent 1: Wow! A thing/creature/occurrence/artifact from beyond the realm of science and nature!
Agent 2: No, that’s probably just a weather balloon.
“That, or Duchovny’s ego has finally assumed physical form.”
How many aliens and lizard people did Agent Scully run across before she stopped rolling her eyes whenever Mulder suggested “monsters” as the solution to the next case? Fifty? A hundred? Scully, you get a nice paycheck and a robust government benefits plan to fight werewolves and vampires. Why are you embarrassed to have our dream job?
“SWAAAAAAMP GAAAAAAS!”
But nobody got screwed by this as badly as the Ghostbusters. As we’ve mentioned before in exhaustive detail, the entire city of New York sues the Ghostbusters for supposedly staging the ghost attack that destroyed several city blocks in the previous film, despite the fact that tens of thousands of witnesses saw it first hand. And where the hell did they think those hundreds of tons of melted marshmallow came from?
From left to right: swamp gas, LSD in the water supply, solar flare.
Then you have the selective skeptics, like in the show Medium, where everyone accepts the psychic detective’s ability, but somehow still manages to second-guess her tips. Just to be clear, they believe she is communicating with ghosts but they question the reliability of the ghosts’ testimony. That’s like watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and believing everything but the “ninja” part.
“Karate? Isn’t that the spicy shit Japanese people put on everything?”
The next five?
#5.Forgetting That The Main Character Is Always Right
#4.Forgetting That The Stupid Character is Stupid
#3.Failing to Remember That Bulletproof Vests Exist
#2.The Dust-Gathering Superweapon
#1.Assuming That The Hero’s Super Powers Won’t Work On You
For more, go here.
What other things do movie characters always seem to forget?
