What are some of the most annoying movie clichés?
08.06.2025 05:50
2) Security guards, average soldiers, and uniformed cops are totally useless
4) Totally selective armor protection
3) Computer beep boops
But when they try to be realistic (by giving everyone a helmet) in Black Hawk Down, one of the complaints about the otherwise excellent movie was, “it’s hard for the audience to distinguish who’s who”.
1) Expert in one = Expert in all
This is something usually found in cop or investigative shows where you have one cast member who is the “resident geek” (usually the forensic scientist). This person could go from hacking the Pentagon on one episode to talking about the DNA and the spread of a weaponized virus on the next one and then figure out the intricacies of automotive engineering the next.
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Did you know that the instrument that audiences of Western movies associate with “desert scenes”, that “flute” or “clarinet” is called the “duduk” and is from ARMENIA?
Computers in movies and TV shows are always making that funny “electronic beeping” sounds whenever they do something. Before 2000s, I totally get why—because computers weren’t very common so it was “mysterious” and “geeky”. But today, all but the poorest and most isolated communities in the world have at least used them and they certainly don’t do beep boops all the time. In fact, if I have a program that beeps every time I do something, my first instinct is to go to Settings and disable it, if not just turning off the speakers altogether. It gets annoying very quickly.
6) Wrong “traditional” music
Goddammit Hollywood, “diversity” isn’t just putting more Black and POC actors on screen. It’s also doing your fucking research on basic crap that will avoid making you look idiotic to people from that part of the world!
The reason they do this in movies is nothing more than to cue the audience that “the computer is doing something”.
5) “Medieval” = everything is brown or dull grey
These guys could just wear t-shirts and nothing would be different. Also, helmets increase the likelihood of you getting harmed while having no helmet and showing your entire head clearly means that you’re more badass and therefore harder to take down.
And this is not some hidden info either. The UNESCO officially described it as “Armenian Oboe”.
And if they do something, they’ll be overmatched by the bad guy/threat very quickly. If they actually do something meaningful, it’s to mistakenly stop the main character after they were being manipulated by the evil mastermind. It’s really predictable.
For those who don’t know, Armenia is a mountainous country south of Russia, not exactly famous for having deserts. Using it to illustrate deserts of Arabia or Persia is like using the bagpipe and tartans to illustrate “the average person from San Francisco” or “a scene in New York City in the 1930s”. This is a video of the duduk:
Of course, I can also talk about “movie hacking” but not only that it already got a little better over the past decade (no more “hack faster!” these days), it’s no longer that common to show the keyboard mashing bit. At most, you get somebody saying “So-and-so Bank was hacked yesterday!”
Their only purpose is to die or get knocked out on screen within minutes of showing up so the bad guys can continue with their evil plans or to warn the main characters that “there’s something dangerous out there” like a lethal gas cloud or a monster.
There’s a few, and even though most of them are understandable if you look beyond the movie itself, it doesn’t make it any better.
Don’t get me started on how movie composers like to mix-and-match “Oriental” music. You’ll hear Chinese and Japanese instruments blended together for Southeast Asian scenes or Indian instruments and melodies to represent Islamic countries (“What? The Taj Mahal is basically a mosque!”).
That’s just not true. Yes, life was harder then, but that doesn’t mean that people back in medieval or early modern period just lived in dirt and looked like dirt. And the sun DID shine back then as it does today, so it’s not all oversaturated dark blue tint even in the middle of the day. They loved colors too (and apparently the only ones hating colors are modern movie producers given that almost everything with CGI has to be shot in the dark to mask terrible models).
Realistically, there would be different subject matter experts for each of those. A PhD means you dove deep into ONE subject and made a little contribution at it, but that doesn’t mean you’re suddenly expert in everything under the sun.
The real reason is because the producers want to keep the cast limited. If you look at cop shows like CSI or NCIS, you’ll notice that there probably aren’t more than 5 or 6 main characters (and maybe a handful of supporting ones popping up time to time). Any more and the audience will start to get confused who’s who as everyone will be fighting for screen time.
If you’re not a main character, all that full suit of armor might as well be paper or plastic. But if you are, even a bikini will bend bullet trajectory.
What are some common historical misconceptions?
Of course, I could rant about how Hollywood like to put Black actors in traditionally white roles but much more rarely tell real Black stories. Africa is an untapped goldmine of fables, legends, and literature the world should hear about, but all Hollywood is interested in is just rehashing the same old stuff with different actors.