…That Are Actually Lies, according to Todd Van Luling for The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/11/8-lies-from-movies_n_5666578.html

All are true, all are interesting, but I would like to add a couple of “lies” that I see over and over again:

First up, the human fall.

Seems simple enough, right?  In real life if you fall over a story in distance and onto hard ground, odds are you will hurt -if not kill- yourself.  Yet its something movies like to use nowadays, the hero leaping/jumping long distances, hitting the ground and either rolling or shaking off the fall and getting on with their superheroic business.

The movie Fast and Furious 6, a franchise that, granted, doesn’t always deal with “real world” physics, was spoiled, to me, in large part because of this.  In the movie’s early going, Dwayne Johnson’s character leaps from a very fast moving car, falls some three or so stories straight down and into a vehicle he and his partner were pursing.  Johnson’s character is uninjured from that fall and tries to stop the car’s driver, then falls off said vehicle (which, let me reiterate, is moving really fast) after a scuffle, and absolutely nothing happens to him.

Later, toward the film’s climax, we have Vin Diesel’s character leaping from his car, flying through the air like Superman, grabbing Michelle Rodriguez’s character while she’s leaping in the opposite direction for a hundred feet or so, then the two of them smash into another car and this somehow lessens the impact of their fall.

They too suffer no serious injuries, though I believe Vin Diesel did frown a little.

I guess my main gripe is that action movies of late (and perhaps not so late, see the 1985 movie Commando and Arnold Schwarzenneger’s escape from an airplane!) push the limits of what a falling human body can withstand.  Someone I casually knew, for example, was on a ladder working on a ceiling light or fan in his house (I’ve been to the house, the ceiling was not terribly high).  He was perhaps on the second or third step of the ladder and somehow lost his balance and fell, landing very awkwardly on his right arm.

The result?

He broke multiple bones in that arm and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent extensive surgery.

The breaks to his arm were so extensive that doctors later told him they almost had to amputate his arm above the elbow.  After considerable physical therapy and recovery, the arm remained very fragile and, according to him, could not withstand any other injury.  He lamented the fact that he couldn’t use it to lift anything heavy nor could it deal with any great amount of force.

This is the reality of what can happen to a human body after a fall, even from relatively small distances.

Another gripe, though one I didn’t find all that bothersome in my youth -and at least tangentially related to Fast and Furious– is what a car is capable of withstanding after it makes a long jump.

Back in the 1970’s and 80’s and shortly after the success of Bullitt (with its magnificent single car chase sequence), there came a whole host of movies featuring progressively greater amounts of car stunt work.  The floodgates really opened after the 1977 success of Smokey and The Bandit, which featured some very impressive stunt work for that time.  Ron Howard’s directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto, released only a month afterwards, was little more than a movie featuring one car crunching bit of stunt work after the other.  As a kid, I loved the hell out of that film…

But one thing I realized was that whenever a car went airborne in a jump, it always landed…badly.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I was a child savant.

Seriously though, every time you were shown one of those stunts, the camera would often follow the car through the air and, when it landed (and depending on how well covered the landing was), you couldn’t help but see a frame or two of the car hitting the ground and almost always noticed the car suffered -sometimes mightily!- from that landing.

The tires might be twisted, the front end might stick up, the body would warp, and pieces -sometimes whole chunks!- might fall off.  Yet if the stunt involved the “good guy’s” car, you could always rely on a cinematic quick cut, usually showing our heroes hootin’ and hollering at the sheer fun or outrageousness of their stunt, and the next shot would reveal that their vehicle -presto!- was completely intact.  Sometimes better than new.

The below compilation of stunts for the Dukes of Hazzard TV show provides plenty of such examples.  See how many times the General Lee looks absolutely totaled after she lands…

Anyway, it is fantasy and perhaps, like the list of 8 Things You Learned From Movies That Are Actually Lies, this sort of stunt work should be taken for what it is, fantasy.