Two things made an impression on me this week:
- The most ridiculous network scene I have ever seen in a movie or series.
- An ad for a Google AI photo tool.
Suspension of disbelief
Fiction relies on our suspension of disbelief. This is when we temporarily allow ourselves to believe something that is not true, so that we can enjoy the story. After all, you can’t enjoy a movie about vampires or zombies if you keep reminding yourself they don’t exist.
Tolkien, who wrote “Lord of the Rings“, preferred the concept of “secondary belief”. For the story to really work, the fictional world must have its own internal and consistent logic. A story must follow its own rules. It’s just annoying if a character can do anything anytime to overcome any challenges. Break the rules, and I lose interest.
Your ability to suspend disbelief also depends on your own knowledge. I spent enough years in court that I am sceptical of courtroom scenes. But I have no medical knowledge. So I happily accept the events in medical dramas that make real doctors roll their eyes.
The 1996 movie “Independence Day” had a predictable plot. Aliens attack Earth, we fight back, and eventually win the day. I was happy to believe that a human combat pilot could fly an alien starship that he’d never seen before. What do I know about flying planes?
But I was not happy when the brilliant mathematician created a virus for the alien mothership in a few hours. How can you hack alien software? What operating system is it using? It must be more advanced than anything we have – after all, the aliens could fly to Earth. I was even more unhappy when they simply uploaded the virus to the alien mothership. Really? No network issues?
During the past week I saw the worst network scene I’ve ever seen. It is in the first episode of the 2014 series “Scorpion”. A bug has brought down the the traffic control software at a major airport. The hero must get a copy of the software from a plane that is in the air. Here comes the climactic moment:
The pilot flies the plane at a very low level, while the hero speeds below it in a sports car. The co-pilot throws out a network cable. The heroine in the car catches the cable and plugs into a laptop. They manage to download the software just before plane and speeding car run out of space. (I captured the scene for the blog post image. You can’t see the network cable, but use your imagination.)
The bug that brought down the software is believable – sounds just like Crowdstrike. The rest was too ridiculous for me to watch further. (And I like fantasy.) No wonder the National Science Teachers Association advised teachers to use the show as an example of bad science in 2015.
Suspension of belief
Suspension of disbelief is a well-known term. Wikipedia describes it as the avoidance of critical thinking. I don’t know if suspension of belief is a recognised term. But I’m using it to remind us to be critical before we believe something is true.
We know that there is a lot of fake content and false information on the Internet. Whether it is created for malicious reasons or not, you can’t believe what you read.
And you can’t believe what you see either. I saw an ad for a Google AI photo tool. The ad shows how, in a few steps, you can merge two photos so that it looks like you are talking to someone who wasn’t even there. No malice intended, but it means that deep(ish) fakes are now available for anyone.
I’d love to hear about the worst computer scene you’ve seen in a movie. Please share your comments on the blog post.