"Movie cliches that need to die...." Topic

…be drawn and quartered, burned to ash, loaded into a cannon and fired off toward Poland.

These are my current list of lazy cliches we see all too often on big summer blockbuster type movies. Feel free to add yours…

• They invaded Earth for our water/salt/beer: nothing on Earth is particularly rare. You'd get more material for your work by just mining the Ort Cloud.
  
• The Hive Mind. Kill the brain bug and every other critter stops fighting/dies/goes to sleep. Just an excuse to have "lots of toys on the table" without having to explain how our four pluck heroes defeat 2.8 million bad guys.
  
• Zoom, pow, whoosh. There is no sound in space.
  
• Alien tech that runs on Windows and conveniently has human-style USB ports we can hack into.

Fight sequences that are either speeded up beyond all comprehension (also helps conceal cheap CGI) or else slo-mo'ed to the point of tedium.

ANYONE who cries "NNNooooooOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOOOOooooOOO!" while all other actions cease.

Gratuitous female kick-ass characters in movies or time periods where genuine kick-ass females are impossible.

People outrunning explosions unless they would somehow be able to do so. It is okay if the Flash or Superman do it, not okay if Batman does it.

Jumping through windows without being cut to ribbons.

Anybody walking away from an explosion.

People not in cover during a shoot out.

Colonels or General officers leading squad sized attacks.

One Uber Hero fights off an entire unit of elite soldiers during training just to show the audience how awesome he (or God help us She) is.

Large quantities of bad guys, allegedly trained soldiers, law enforcement or enhanced robotic cyborgish creatures, with automatic weapons that cannot hit the hero/heroine despite firing hundreds or sometimes thousands of rounds.

Also the added joy of high powered metal jacketed slugs in large quantity being unable to penetrate any flimsy cover in which said hero/heroine chooses to cower.

- Fire doesn't radiate any heat, as long as the flame stays a 1/4th of an inch away from you, you'll escape without a mark. Similarly explosions do not create a shockwave so as long as the explosion flames don't touch you, you're 100% safe.
- Ominous BRAAAAAM sound
- Female character is a highly skilled and talented badass who trained for years to become almost supernaturally skilled in kicking butts. Picks up a dweeb who learns all the appropriate skills in less than 24 hours and completely surpasses her, even saving her life and reducing her to a damsel in distress/love interest.
- Robots can learn any skill and vastly outperform humans on any level, but are baffled by stuff like emotions or jokes.
- Bad guy has a baroque plan to get themselves captured and put in a glass-walled prison so they can confront the good guys before breaking out again and utterly defeating the good guys. The plan usually has perfect timing and everything runs smoothly though 90% of it is based on random luck and timing.
- Characters who are warriors or soldiers but never wear any kind of head protection or even a hat so that audiences don't get confused.
- Major unnecessary changes when making adaptations of books, comics or remaking movies.
- Every "hero" is a brooding, growling, viciously misanthropic anti-hero who turns out to have been scarred by some horrible trauma in the past and is reluctantly goaded into saving the day.
- Remake is a detailed deconstruction of the original, where plot elements and details are randomly reversed or switched around to simulate creativity, while many plot elements become baffling if you never saw the original. Just remake the damn thing, don't try to appear smart and smug about it, you're not that good to begin with.

Everything in Fury.

hero walks through a building or anyplace and just before they go into a room or anyplace they pull the slide back on the gun or rack in a shot gun round. Really all that time and your just loading a round now.

Maverick detectives who don't play by the rules and have a complex home life yet get results.

Racking a slide on a pump shotgun to show your adversary "you mean business". Maybe glaring at them while SLOWLY LOADING the shells would be REALLY threatening…?

Invulnerable/charmed characters that never die, despite how badly the odds are stacked against them, or that miraculously recover from grievous wounds almost immediately after getting them.

"People not in cover during a shoot out".

To be fair, most of your WWII and later, tabletop soldiers seem to like to fight this way, despite my pleas for prone figs from manufacturers.

I'm told they aren't popular with customers.

Apparently, they prefer cardboard chits, or other markers to denote them going prone, instead of the real thing.

Time for rules writers to make them suffer the consequences on the battlefield.

A car chase with the bad guys vehicle crashing into a fire hydrant causing both the car to go airborne and water to shoot out of the hydrant.
Consider crates, ash cans, fruit stores, newstands and anything else a car can go through, part of this equation.

BARF!!! I just hate that.

- The top scientist in any field is a drop-dead gorgeous 23-year old supermodel who moves like a ninja and fights like a squad of Marines.
- Dystopian futures where a tiny elite minority hog all the advanced tech, leaving the rest of the planet in the 9th century for no rational reason other than that they would look despicably evil to outside observers.
- "Primitive" cultures that have a supernatural connection to nature and are all blessed with magical abilities and perfect wisdom we modern humans utterly lack.
- Every Asian is a master of martial arts.
- Every black man is Morgan Freeman.
- Aliens who have and retain the same uniform culture no matter how many light-years and millennia of complete separation. Their USB drives remain compatible even after ten thousand years.
- The evil guy who is horribly "cursed" with terrible afflictions such as immortality and a truckload of awesome supernatural powers, who is then locked away for a thousand years and as it happens is about to wake up coming Monday morning and will conquer the planet at a snap of the fingers if nobody stops him in time by performing an arbitrarily near impossible task.
- The entire "scientific" premise of the movie "that is so mind-bogglingly awesome they couldn't stop high-fiving and patting each other on the back for weeks" doesn't stand up to five minutes of googling.
- The only way to save a character's life is cauterization, despite all the risks involved and other methods being available at the time.
- Medieval catapults shooting napalm bombs and flaming arrows. One wonders why somebody bothered to invent guns.
- "Primitive" weapons always beat the most advanced weapon systems. Swords and bows will trump assault rifles and artillery every time.
- Whenever ancient gods are involved it's always a "gods vs man" type scenario where the characters must rise up against the invariably evil deities who always oppress mankind.
- Leather bracers and arm bracelets as armour.
- "Strong woman" as the only option for female characters. Whatever happened to interesting, silly, funny, crazy, cool, sassy, fearful, confident, skilled, appealing, sweet, flawed, courageous, tough, clever, intelligent, cunning, evil, nasty, whiny, caring, flirty, generous, flawed women ?
- The "everything including the king is caked in mud, it must be the middle ages" look.
- Portraying countries other than the US with stereotypes that were already dated last century.
- Children who are impossibly cute, precociously smart, wise-cracking midgets.
- "Dark, gritty and grounded in reality"
- Current tropes, memes and fashion trends applied to any period in history.
- Ancient armies march and enter the battlefield in perfect formation only to break ranks and charge headlong at the enemy with everybody scattered homogeneously across the battlefield a while later.
- Cavalry charging for enormous distances and then coming to a complete halt to fight in melee.
- Horses without any intelligence or sense of self-preservation used as battering rams.
- Ensemble casts of "Top-tier, highly trained professionals, hand-picked for the mission" who have zero regard for hierarchy, rank, and proper procedure, all have their own hidden agenda, carry grudges, have a degree in sociopathy and never work well with others.
- Scientists are always evil and corrupt, except when they are portrayed as 23-old supermodel love-interests for the hero.

Bad guys who instead of killing the "hero" put in place some convoluted process to kill them allowing them time to escape

The guy who has just a week or less to go before discharge/date of transfer/etc. who then dies.

The infinitely reloading pistol/rifle/etc. and the trooper who carries enough rounds to spray everywhere all the time, on full auto, and never runs out, despite the fact that you can't see an extra mag on him anywhere. Come to think of it, maybe this is why the hero can rack the slide, but the gun was already loaded…and not worry about wasting a round.

Detectives who carry concealed, but when they pull their pistol out, its a full-size, double-stack mag blaster that would print so badly no one could miss that they are carrying. Or so heavy (if loaded) that they would need suspenders to keep their pants up.

Rob

people need to start thrusting with their swords. Use the pointy side of the sword. It kills better.

The only good cliche…

Nimble space fighters that look like jet fighters on steroids darting between energy beams to take-out enemy capital ships in space; aerodynamics don't count in space and the bigger they are, the harder they hit

Russia is snowed in 24/7 – 365 days a year. It may be high summer in the US/Europe, but there will be snow and ice in Moscow.

"Acting" that consists of shouting and whispering.

Inspirational speeches consisting of telling the men how many just died in your cause but it didn't accomplish anything. I'm looking at you Robb Stark.

People escaping lava flows by climbing a bridge over the lava or people walking right next to lava flows…have they never heard of HEAT. My favorite of all time was the guy who stood in lava holding a child above the flow to hand him/her off to someone nearby.

The aliens look just like us.

Most of the physics in the movie GRAVITY. Good story, sucky science.

People flying backward 10 or 20 feet when shot.

Movies based on a video game.

Pretty much anything put out by Hollywood.

Man, you guys seem to want to see some darn boring movies.

Artillery rounds that explode upwards rather than outwards.

"Sean Bean must die."

Beanar Morghulis?

Any and everything that is "Fast" and/or "Furious."

Too many people are bad enough drivers, no need to make them think that drivers and cars "can really do that stuff."

Impact fuses on artillery and catapult projectiles from the ACW back to ancient times. And artillery explosions that make three guys use a trampoline to fly into the air head over heels.

Getting shot in the shoulder without any major bad effects

DAMN!

Cold Steel, you beat me to it!

My only addition to this almost complete is explosive projectiles from ordinary Cannon from the Napoleonic wars ….

oh wait, Red Banner4145 beat me to that too.

Damn!

When told to look up/ hack into, something, the, "Computer Guy/Gal", constantly banging on keys, with thousands of moving pictures, graphs, bleeps, bloops, swoosh.
(pardon the complete disregard to grammar)

I think we are talking about tropes here rather than cliches, but who cares.

I would have liked to have seen a Star Trek Movie where:

- The Enterprise encounters a powerful splinter group leader who is an old friend of Kirk/Piccard and harbors no ill will against him or the Federation
- The Enterprise encounters a hostile unknown alien ship and raises her shields and powers up her weapons PRIOR to being fired on and severely damaged
- The Enterprise is hit with a some secret never before seen weapon that does not cause a warp core breach, console explosion, major system failure or cause the shields to go down. In fact, the weapon has no effect whatsoever on the Enterprise.
- The alien ship, though much larger, turns out to be much less powerful than the Enterprise
- The aliens are not some variation of rubberized (make-up wise) humans
- Some unknown virus or bacteria or malady infects part of the Enterprise's crew, and is promptly identified, treated, cured and eliminated without any drama at all, by the ship's doctors
- The Enterprise violates some neutral border and is promptly escorted back over the border by a squadron of warships
- Allied or friendly ships do not suddenly appear to rescue or reinforce the Enterprise
- A never before seen Federation ship that is not put together from re-adjusted and rescaled parts of one of the Enterprises appears
- the computer says "Sorry – out of stock" when someone orders "Tea, Earl Grey"

What a lovely poll idea.

Beanar Morghulis

Well done Rabbit3

I think we are talking about tropes here rather than cliches, but who cares.

A Cliché is simply an over-used trope.

The typical "teen exploitation" movies that depict all adults, especially teachers, as cluleless dim-wits, while the rebellous, hedonistic teens are the heroes who end up being successful in life. Total rubbish!

"Dark, gritty and grounded in reality"

Oh man, this, a thousand times this. Yes, it was cool and exciting when they started doing this in the mid-2000's. It's WELL past having worn out it's welcome.

-Will

Control room erupts into cheering mass at the climax of the actiom

Single minion claps heroes, then everyone else catches on

Lens flare

Post apocalyptic dress sense based on porn movies (Mad Max gets a bye for this though)

Well, at least "the kid from Brooklyn isn't going to make it" seems to have been retired.

"This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill."

The alien pokes a baseball bat sized hole in the hero but it doesn't seem to affect him/her.

Guns making the "klickity-klack" sounds when they are picked up.

Swords making "SHING!" sounds when being drawn from scabbards.

Apparently common computers are FILLED with high explosives, so when the "evil enemy" loads a virus and the victim hit the keyboard, all building explodes.

Hero only has to type "secret enemy base" in any web engine to obtain a complete blueprint of the correct enemy base.

The "matrix" lean back so the axe-sword-arrow-bullet pases just over the chest and head of the hero-villain.

Trained military personnel who insist on firing from the hip.

Such sublimely choreographed melee combat that the combatants were obviously former co-workers on the Cirque de Soleil touring production.

The instant and silent death of anyone whose head is twisted to the side by the hero.

Ditto with any poor sentry whose throat is slit.

The heroes know instinctively how to use any firearm, operate any radio, or hack into any computer system in seconds, even if those objects are from aliens who are thousands of years more advanced than we are.

Firing two pistols at the same time with any degree of accuracy.

Every android or human/alien half-breed wants to be more human, or whose human qualities are their saving grace in a moment of crisis.

"Special" crewmembers who don't have to wear the standard uniform (Yes, T'Pal, Seven-of-Nine, and Counselor Troi, I'm looking at you).

"Death Star Syndrome": Everything will be okay and the conflict will be over if the heroes can just push the Big Red Button, launch the One Final Torpedo, upload the Data Feed that Reveals All, download the Fix-Everything Code Snippet, or kill the Big Boss. All the bad guys will just drop their weapons and walk away, no hard feelings.

"Captain" superheroes. What are they the captain of?

See also "Lord" supervillains. What are they lord of? "This is Lord Vader, Viscount of Mos Eisley".

See also "Doctor". What was Dr. No a doctor of? Did he have a PhD in Horribleness? Was Moriarty a Professor of Criminality? Where did he teach?

The military is always involved in some massive, evil conspiracy.

All native peoples are infinitely wise, in tune with nature, and speak in fortune-cookie-esque snippets.

Characters from the Midwest* and Northern Great Plains who have Southern or Southwestern accents. Drives me nuts.

* I suppose those parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois that border Kentucky might be different.

Has anyone mentioned 'reversing the polarity' yet?

How about swords making the SHING sound when you pull them out of flesh?

Somebody! Anybody!
Send a link to this thread to Hollywood STAT!
We may just be able to save the next movie!

"Self-destruct" is adverted in the last few seconds.

"Cute", sassy, precocious kids. This is a Spielberg specialty.

I'll stick my neck out a little here (though one or two have alluded to it above): women who are top martial artists and regularly take out men in a straight up fight. Oh, and happen to drop dead gorgeous as well. This just doesn't happen very much and never has. Women have so many wonderful qualities to bring to a film without being shaped into strange imitations of men. (Edit: And by saying this I'm not advocating they be portrayed as squealing ninnies either! That's just as bad.)

People with Southern accents being portrayed as bigots, uneducated, unwashed or, most likely, all three at once. Gets very old.