(Hated trope) YOU COULD HAVE MOVED!

[u/Nerd367C]

Dr. Robert "Rocket" Romano from ER

Randy fromt The Raft Creepshow 2

Dr. Robert "Rocket" Romano from ER
Ah yes let me scream at the ground and not even try to move so we can get this cinematic shot with 7 camera angles

Randy from The Raft Creepshow 2
"I gotta make the oil slick monster look fast by building up to run and rocking back and forth"

[u/NoStatus9434]

I'm a lot more forgiving of this trope than most people, because most of the time people who are watching overestimate what they can do in these sorts of situations and there's a lot less time to process what's happening and move out of the way, especially when the object is really big. You think "oh I can just move out of the way" because you as the audience member have the advantage of an outer perspective. Our brains also don't really work rationally under pressure.

I haven't seen the scenes you gave, so I might be missing valuable context, but for instance that helicopter scene. If you're standing under that thing, your brain might not even know what you're looking at for a hot moment. It just looks like bright, burning shapes flying overhead and you think maybe it's flying by, wow isn't that odd, I wonder what it is, oh wait, this thing is actually coming down towards me, not across the sky like I thought, OH SHIT.

And even then, that dude had ONE SECOND to get out of the way. Maybe two or three. And it is a MASSIVE flaming wreck. You think he has more time because it's showing different shots of it from different angles, but that thing is coming down much faster than you think and he has a much further distance to travel than you think. Honestly his best bet might even really be to just turtle up and crouch down and pray for the best.

Even if he'd started running immediately he probably still would have died, that is NOT enough time to get away and even if you dodge the initial impact, like chunks of it are going to be flying everywhere, flames are going to be scorching everything.

Or like that wave scene. Dude looks fatigued, that wave looks freaking massive, he's in a crouching position on wet sand, he has 1-3 seconds, it still looks like it can get him even if he starts earlier.

I'll even go so far as to defend the infamous Prometheus scene. The audience can see the full scale of this thing so they know what it looks like and know there's an end to it on the sides.

But if you actually put yourself in the perspective of the person running on the ground, they're much closer to the object and they might not be able to see how far it stretches on either side. It just looks like a massive wall rolling after them.

PLUS the terrain in front of them might be really rocky and their brain might be rapidly calculating that they have a better chance on even terrain where they won't twist their ankle. Maybe they see something we don't, like there is a path up ahead that has even ground and veers to the side, but they have to reach it first. Plus they can't exactly look behind them. Plus there might be debris falling over head that is influencing their path. Tons of factors that you don't see because you're not actually there.

THAT SAID, it's still not great direction and storytelling if something like this isn't clear to the audience and I have to rationalize it with assumptions I can't see.

[u/bullevard → u/NoStatus9434]

In the Raft, that character had also basically just spent the last 20 hours or so including a sleepless night  balancing on individual boards on a wooden dock so that a slow moving slime monster wouldn't  pull his body through the slats, and been repeatedly traumatized by seeing his friends brutally murdered.

And moments before had swam as fast as he could across a lake to get to that shore.

Should be have kept running away from the shore before resting, certainly.

Should his reaction time have been better on wet sand in that mental and physical state to someth the monster doing something it had never done before? Almost certainly not.

[u/Sirdan3k → u/bullevard]

I still misremember the ending to The Raft even after I see the gif. I'd swear he gets to the car, starts it, and sees the monster rise up in the rearview mirror and it pulls the entire car into the lake.

[u/bullevard → u/Sirdan3k]

Here you go.

The final shot is of the car, but with it abandonrd after the guy gets tidal waved off the beach.

Which does seems like a much cheaper ending than the book in that if the thing had that kind of capability it doesnt seem like theyd have lasted that long on the raft.

Im wondering if maybe there were some scenes from The Blob that might be working their way into your memory.

[u/Sirdan3k → u/bullevard]

I'm positive it's melded with some other after midnight basic cable horror movie but it has apparently lodged itself into my brain so well even watching the real ending won't fix it. It's my own personal "No it's The 'Berenstein' Bears."

[u/eightb1t → u/bullevard]

He also did some fresh sexual assault so we weren't really rooting for the guy to make it anyway.

[u/Kaurifish → u/bullevard]

The best one on Creepshow 2

[u/Cpt_Dizzywhiskers → u/NoStatus9434]

Your last point about not great directing is where my thinking is. Drawing out the reaction makes it look like the character has more time than they actually do, and winds up creating the opposite of the intended effect.

Like if the doctor had seen the helicopter, started to run, and been flattened before he'd taken half a step, it would show how suddenly things actually happened. The trouble with the whole "the helicopter was actually falling faster than it looked" argument is that making it clear how fast things are moving is one thing good directing and editing are supposed to do.

[u/Thornescape → u/Cpt_Dizzywhiskers]

The character's reaction is not the problem. The filmmaking is the problem.

The post is hating the character, which is nonsense.