Movies are unrealistic because of communication bandwidth

Movies have scientific inaccuracies, for example:

• Sounds: sounds in space, eagle sounds, loudness of guns
• Zooming in infinitely, blood spatter, etc
• On crime scenes, one person handles what in reality would be many individual experts

We also often see unrealistic or unfair depictions:

• Aliens have a humanoid shape, and talk English.
• Robots have a soul and just want to be human, or are killers
• Depression and mental illnesses leads to violence; Depictions of autists, nerds, cheerleaders, etc are stereotypical
• How societal processes work; for example, the judicial system in the US, fraction of crimes solved by confession; Hunting a criminal down to the end of the world vs. blocking them from participating in society and beaurocracy.

People complain about these, but I have some sympathy with movie makers.

As a movie maker, you have to communicate relatively quickly to get the story along. Using tropes and concepts that the audience is already familiar with is not only handy, but essential.

You cannot start a movie with a scientific lecture and debunking, and then build upon what the audience has just learned.

So when you see an alien arriving and speaking English, don’t think “That’s a giant plot hole”, but “OK, the movie writers are dumbing it down for me and skipping some steps, because otherwise the audience would be bored with the details here.”

In this view, the communication is “movie makers” -> “agreed-upon communication building blocks” plus ~1 new element this movie manages to introduce -> “audience”.

The limiting factor is clearly the number of communication building blocks available.

The situation gets more dramatic as big film studies aim for world-wide audiences. Then, the number of universally understood concepts that can be used for communication are further limited. This leads to less humor in movies.

The antidote to this is to watch smaller productions aimed at more local audiences. Or, to accept that there is this additional communication layer, and a laser, a space ship, an alien or a detective should not be taken literally, but as a stand-in for a communicated concept.

Still, I have some reservations:

• 24 promoted the misconception that torture is an effective way to obtain truthful information or a long-term helpful strategy eased up an audience to false intelligence leading to the US’s Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse.
• Police shows give false impressions of the science (or lack thereof) in analysing crime scenes (blood spatter, fingerprints, burning, video evidence, witness account reliability, false confessions).
• Portraying war without showing the many wounded, the innocent people who get in the cross-fire, the destruction and disruption and ensuing poverty, the power vacuum and people abusing it, and the women and children who suffer from selfish men.