The other night my roommate was telling me about a conversation him and some of our friends were having about the show Stargate SG-1, and not understanding what there is to like about it. Just to let you know they’re all in the film program down here at Full Sail College, so they see it more in terms of the actual production of the show I guess. Now I, as very much a Stargate fan, wish I had been there to defend my beloved “dork TV” as I’ve come to call the somewhat dorky/nerdy shows I watch. Most of which happen to come on the Sci-Fi Channel. Shows like Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Eureka, Enterprise, and Firefly when it was on. Oh how I miss Firefly.
While I can completely understand that Stargate may not tickle everyone’s fancy, their conversation leads me to wonder what ever happened to suspension of disbelief? So maybe it’s not Grey’s Anatomy or Friends, and maybe it’s not an award winning machine like some of the more popular series out there are, but what’s wrong with that?
I do have to mention here that Stargate has been on for 10 seasons, this being it’s last season much to my dismay, and been nominated for 8 Emmy’s. Obviously they’ve been doing something right.
My friends aren’t the only people who I’ve heard talk about things like this either. Back in North Carolina I was a manager at a movie theater. I can’t even begin to count the times I’ve heard customers talking about some production aspect of a movie and how it could have been done better. Maybe I’m just strange, but when I go to watch a movie or a television show, I don’t go to see how well it was made. I go to be entertained. I go to experience a story that I (and most anybody else for that matter) will never be able to experience in real life. With the exception of documentaries and the like, isn’t that what a movie or a TV show is for? Isn’t that, at its most basic level, what draws most people in? That sense of escaping to someplace other than where you currently are. Our world kind of sucks sometimes. I personally look forward to being able to find someplace else to be for an hour or two at a time, even if it’s just on television or in a movie theater. So where did we lose that child-like sense of wonder?
Thankfully nobody has ever had a problem with the realism of these shows in my hearing. If that day does come, I’ll be fully inclined to ask them which they find more believable… Life on other planets, or a radioactive spider bite giving someone super-human powers. The $800+ million dollar worldwide grosses for Spiderman 3 say nobody is looking too hard for reality.
Technorati Tags: disbelief, entertainment, escape, movies, stargate+sg1
I can certainly understand their point, Earl. They are watching from a very critical perspective. I’m not a movie maker, but I watch some movies with a critical eye on the technology that are used in the movies. I just groan sometimes when I see the ‘liberties’ that they take with what a computer can do, how fast it can do it, and how easily.
Of course, it depends on the context. If it is in Star Trek, then it’s OK because that is Sci-Fi; however, if I am supposed to suspend my disbelief, they better make it close to reality.
The worst offense that I’ve have seen of this was in the movie Firewall. Harrison Ford takes out the scanner bar from a fax machine, hooks it to an iPod, tapes it a screen, downloads information to the iPod, and then uses OCR to read the information to get the account numbers that he needs. Sheesh! That’s more than bending things! I almost left at that point.
The movie was horrible anyway, but that was just plan offensive to expect for me to believe that rubbish! :-)
Paul,
Then I guess one’s belief sysem is tied to one’s knowledge base, as in your IT knowledge making the Firewall movie totally unbelievable. For some who knew nothing about electronics or computers that scene you described was probably totally believable.
I would agree with you both in general and in the fact that the movie Firewall was terrible. :-)
Of course my son, Aaron, would have to directly comment to this. This post was his. He’s living in Florida but is a contributing author here sometimes, as indicated by the by-line at the end of the post.
Paul. I absolutely can agree with you about Firewall. I never got to see the whole movie, mostly because it just never caught my interest, but that part was one of a couple I saw just from walking in. Completely unrealistic. But like Dad said, those without the computer background won’t notice something like this as easily as those with the computer experience. I’ve got a couple of friends back in NC that had they seen the movie would probably be amazed that an iPod can do so much.
For the most part though I’ve always found that I can enjoy a movie much more if I go in “dumb”. For the time I’m in that theater watching the movie I know nothing but what they show me.
I guess it’s all a matter of how deeply you can immerse yourself in the story being shown to you on the screen. I can usually get very deep into the movie so I suppose I have a little different view of things. Even when a movie isn’t made perfectly, as long as the story really catches me I can overlook a fair amount of bs.
Aaron: I agree. I can overlook a lot of things if the story is captivating, but I can honestly say that this story was not in the least bit captivating.