A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Have you ever seen the corpse of someone who jumped or fell off a tall building?  If you haven’t, count yourself lucky.  I promise you, it’s not pretty.  But in the movies (and on TV) everything’s hunky-dory if someone just catches you before you hit the ground.  Take Hancock, which is merely the latest example out of, well, a few million metric buttloads.  In a widely-seen trailer moment, Hancock teaches an obnoxious kid a lesson by tossing him about seventy five miles straight up into the sky and then catching him just a fraction of a microsecond before he slams into the pavement and explodes into a giant mess full of blood and guts and partially digested Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups and miscellaneous other substances better left unnamed.  In reality, being caught like that would be pretty much just as bad as hitting the ground, because the real problem is the force of impact.  If you want to survive a fall like that unscathed, you need to slow down gradually, not instantly.  (Hence the use of parachutes as opposed to a bunch of people standing around in a field with their arms out.)  So what Hancock should’ve done was fly well up into the sky, more or less match downward velocities with the jerk he’d tossed up there, grab him, and then gradually decelerate to a nice, easy landing.

Now, I know this is kind of nitpicking, and it may seem like I’m the only one who cares about this particular issue, but it’s representative of a larger problem.  If you want readers and audience members to suspend disbelief, whatever you write has to be completely believable within the context of the story, and it has to be internally consistent.  If that context is a magical fantasy fairy-land where people wave wands made out of special dried mushrooms and conjure up giant fluffy bunnies, then great, conjure all the giant fluffy bunnies you want… as long as people always use those special dried mushroom wands to do it.  If the context of the story is the real world, though, and you’re creating a superhero within that real world that we all live in, then even if the superhero is impossible (or at least unlike anyone that we know of who’s existed to date) the world in which the superhero exists should be the exact same world we all wake up and eat cold Pop Tarts in every day.  In other words, Hancock can be super-tough and survive a fall from the moon; that’s totally fair.  The kid, however, has to be just like every other kid on earth.  He needs a parachute.

Audiences seem pretty used to the catching thing by now, so unless you care about these things like I do, I guess you don’t have to worry about it, but you definitely do need to avoid any obvious inconsistency or implausibility that people haven’t been conditioned to accept.  It’s what I call my “people have to get squished” rule — unless there’s a good and specific reason for someone not to get squished, and unless you’ve already established that reason in your script well before the potential squishing, the logical and expected squishing has to happen.  (And by “squishing”, of course I mean whatever consequence should be unfolding in your story.)  If it doesn’t, you’ve just killed the audience’s or your reader’s suspension of disbelief.  And I promise you, a once-healthy suspension of disbelief splattered all over the ground is an ugly and unfortunate thing.