Gross Archive

Dumb Lies Movies Taught You


Every one knows that not everything they see in a movie is realistic, but there are occasions when certain scene are overused so much that they become accepted as fact. From Magic defibrillator to tracking phones.

Explosions are no big deal

It wouldn't be a great movie without the cliche explosion and walkaway. You know the one: The shock wave was enough to shatter buildings, cars and everything except the guy who is walking away in slow motions not looking back. Well Apart from Ben Foster in The Mechanic and Django, Who both failed to get the memo. In reality, that same shock wave could tear out heroes to pieces from flying shrapnel and even if his body did remain intact, the shock wave  wouldn't push him forward, it will just go through. This alone will be enough to stop a heart. While we re on explosions, there's no way they can be started by a cigarette butt.

Drugs to the heart
if we've  learnt anything from pulp fiction, its that someone can survive deadly heroine overdose if adrenaline i injected straight into their heart. But is slamming a needle through the heart purely for dramatic effect? Well intra-cardiac injections are a real thing, but they re almost never used because there are many ways to administer medicine without the potential lethal risk of puncturing a hole in the heart. Just a s effective is injecting medicine into a persons bloodstream through veins as blood circulates through the entire body in less than a minute. Intra-cardiac injections are extremely risky  as they could cause fatal lung puncture.

Tracing a phone call takes time

Here is how the situation goes down: The good guy are on the phone to the bad guy and they have to keep him talking for about a minute before they can trace the call to find his location. In actuality phone tapping like this haven't been accurate since the seventies, when phone carrier stopped using operator and switchboards and started using electronic switch mechanism. With a cell phone, it can actually be instantaneous as police can track it if the GPS is on. The only time the movie scenario could work is when the bad guy is using stolen phone or prepaid phone, and even the, the police can use  cell tower to find a location of a phone and triangulate its position. But this could take up to half an hour.

Chloroform Nap
Whats the best way to completely knock someone out? Chloroform of course! Well, that's what movies have made you believe. But the truth is, its not as effective as you think. It takes at least five minutes of inhaling chloroform fumes to render someone unconscious and even then, this doesn't mean they are going to be knocked out for a significant amount of time.They will need a continuous supply to keep them passed out. And failure to keep the chin supported will result to the victims tongue blocking their airway and suffocating them. So the whole sticking a rag on someones mouth, lobbing them in a car and waiting for them to wake again in a couple of hours is completely unrealistic.

Drowning dramatically
On the big screen, drowning victim have plenty of time to splash around, flail their arm in the air and screen for help right up to the moment they go under, but in real life this wouldn't be the case. This is because when a person is on the cusp of drowning, the final 20-60 seconds before sinking underwater, they enter a state of preservation called "Instructive Drowning Response". This state causes voluntary movement to become impossible. The person tends to bob, their legs do not kick and their arms are held laterally against their body. It also typically means a drowning person will die quietly, since they are unable to keep their mouth above water for long to cry for assistance.

Pixels are Pixels
Lets set the record straight. If you zoom in really close on a grainy CCTV image until it almost fills the screen, there is no magic "enhance image " button to make the image perfectly clear. Pixels don't work like that. Of course movies would have us think otherwise. One especially embarrassed example is in blade runner .. when Decker zooms in on a reflection in a cabinet door and manages to recreate the face. Else where, in enemy of the state, Jack Black uses his supernatural power to rotate a CCTV footage in 3D. Remarkable and impossible

Bullets make anything explode
Bullets in movies are awesome aren't they? they cause pretty much anything to explode into flames. the classic movie staple is firing a bullet at a car's gas tank or some gasoline and it immediately blows up, allowing the protagonist or the antagonist to get away. But just imagine if a sudden impact or puncture on a car caused a huge fireball the size of a house, every car accident would look like a Michael Bay movie. In reality, the "shoot the gas" scene is a myth. it was debunked on TH Discovery Channel's show Mythbusters, when Mythbuster Jamie Hynaman fire multiple bullets on a car's gas thank and no explosion occurred. The only time it could work is if a tracer bullet was shot from a fuel thank from a great distance so the round could ignite with air friction and the gasoline  will the catch fire.

Shattered glasses is painless
No action film is complete without at least one of the characters jumping through or falling through a glass window and then managing to walk away with barely any cut. Even Bridget Jones has the scene where its raining men and shards of glass but both Collins and Huges are both okay.The thing is broken glass has razor-sharp edges that can cut right through clothing and human flesh. So even if a person survives falling  out of a window, they could suffer from blunt trauma wounds, severe damage to nerves, vessels and tendons all of with could very easily result to disability or even death.

The Insanity Defense Works
A time to kill is a classic example of this. The court finds Samuel L. Jackson's character not guilty by reason of temporary insanity for the murder of two men who raped his daughter except the whole thing is a bit of farce. The defense never tries to assume the jury that Jackson was temporarily insane, in fact they make it clear that he did commit the crime --- yet still they ask the jury not to find him guilty. The insanity defense is also used in order films such as Primal Fear and Batman Begins. But in real life the defense is rarely used. On average, less than one percent of cases in the US use it and even when they do, it unsuccessful less than 25% of the time. Furthermore, those found non guilty for reason of mental insanity are sent top mental institutions.

The magic Defibrillator
You know the scene: a patient is flat-lining but someone defibrillators them away and miraculously their heart is shocked back to life! In real life though, no one can bring someone back into the world with a defibrillator if they re flat-lining. Its main main purpose is to current a heart rhythm if someone goes into cardiac arrest before it stops.

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