Some excellent SciFi stories are flawed by concepts that great authors would not allow in their novels or short stories. Asimov, Niven, Clark, and other good writers do not allow utter nonsense in their stories. I wish Hollywood and the TV industry would follow their example.

I enjoyed the Matrix, Star Gate and various other TV shows & movies, but I wonder where they get their technical consultants. Perhaps they are some producer’s poor relatives who cannot act, direct, or move props.The matrix was based on a wonderful concept, but how does a pill given in virtual reality have an effect on the physical body? I was tempted to leave the theater due to that nonsense, but the basic movie was entertaining so I stayed.

The last Star Fighter introduced a CPU chip that proved for instant translation of languages. A bit far fetched, but way better than Star Gate & Star Trek where everybody speaks modern English.

Star Gate has a gate on each planet, delivered in the past by a star ship, and a worm hole while bordering on fantasy is not logically impossible. The Star Trek transporter is utter nonsense. The Fly teleporter at least had a transmitter and a receiver, but the Star Trek transporter is supposed to be able to beam you to a barren planet. Another hokey theme in Star Trek was getting trapped in some holodeck virtual reality situation. The transporter could retrieve you from a planet 500 miles away, but it could not save you from the holodeck?

The Six Million dollar man was entertaining, but had a lot of flaws. He had bionic legs and a bionic arm, but he should have broken his ordinary spinal column lifting huge weights. There were a lot of similarly silly incidents in that series.There are a lot of other stories requiring better technical consultants, but the above give you an idea of what bothers me. I am sure that many who post here can describe other nonsense from SciFi movies and TV fare.

Another of my pet peeves about TV shows and movies is the introduction of Scifi and/or fantasy in ordinary stories. I turn off any police or detective show when they introduce a psychic to help they solve the crime. I can enjoy a SciFi or fantasy story involving telepathy and/or or other paranormal concepts, but it bugs me when such concepts are introduced in reality-based stories.

BTW: I enjoy a lot of SCiFi which has technical flaws, but such flaws hurt otherwise entertaining stories and cause me to turn stop watching some stories which would hold my attention if they avoided the utter nonsense.

The matrix was based on a wonderful concept, but how does a pill given in virtual reality have an effect on the physical body? I was tempted to leave the theater due to that nonsense, but the basic movie was entertaining so I stayed.

That's some silly nitpickery. What really got me was that they could somehow use humans as a source of energy. Why not go nuclear? Why not eliminate all humans– using them as energy would be a net loss of energy for the machines. Humans are natural consumers, they don't produce energy, they're an enrgy sink.

A pill that wakes you from VR? Why would guns work in VR? Why even bother using guns, or bothering to reload, for that matter? For that matter, when Neo was "bugged," why did the machines need to bug him? I mean, they shoul dknow exactly where he was.

Of course, the whole purpose of The Matrix, other than making lots of money, was mind over matter, since nothing really existed. If you believed the pill would show you what reality was, so be it. It woke you up. An electronic cocktail that fed the machines plugged to your spine false impulses, made them think you were dead. Of course, when the machines spat Neo out, he should have gone to the big blender where they turn him back into food for the other sleeping humans.

Some excellent SciFi stories are flawed by concepts that great authors would not allow in their novels or short stories. Asimov, Niven, Clark, and other good writers do not allow utter nonsense in their stories. I wish Hollywood and the TV industry would follow their example.

I enjoyed the Matrix, Star Gate and various other TV shows & movies, but I wonder where they get their technical consultants. Perhaps they are some producer’s poor relatives who cannot act, direct, or move props.The matrix was based on a wonderful concept, but how does a pill given in virtual reality have an effect on the physical body? I was tempted to leave the theater due to that nonsense, but the basic movie was entertaining so I stayed.

The last Star Fighter introduced a CPU chip that proved for instant translation of languages. A bit far fetched, but way better than Star Gate & Star Trek where everybody speaks modern English.

Star Gate has a gate on each planet, delivered in the past by a star ship, and a worm hole while bordering on fantasy is not logically impossible. The Star Trek transporter is utter nonsense. The Fly teleporter at least had a transmitter and a receiver, but the Star Trek transporter is supposed to be able to beam you to a barren planet. Another hokey theme in Star Trek was getting trapped in some holodeck virtual reality situation. The transporter could retrieve you from a planet 500 miles away, but it could not save you from the holodeck?

The Six Million dollar man was entertaining, but had a lot of flaws. He had bionic legs and a bionic arm, but he should have broken his ordinary spinal column lifting huge weights. There were a lot of similarly silly incidents in that series.There are a lot of other stories requiring better technical consultants, but the above give you an idea of what bothers me. I am sure that many who post here can describe other nonsense from SciFi movies and TV fare.

Another of my pet peeves about TV shows and movies is the introduction of Scifi and/or fantasy in ordinary stories. I turn off any police or detective show when they introduce a psychic to help they solve the crime. I can enjoy a SciFi or fantasy story involving telepathy and/or or other paranormal concepts, but it bugs me when such concepts are introduced in reality-based stories.

BTW: I enjoy a lot of SCiFi which has technical flaws, but such flaws hurt otherwise entertaining stories and cause me to turn stop watching some stories which would hold my attention if they avoided the utter nonsense.

I was pretty sure that they said that the pill in the Matrix was some sort of tracking device. Or maybe it was the thing that made him turn into The Silver Surfer when he touched that mirror.

In the Star Trek universe they actually have a translator program of some sort onboard all thier ships. It was illustrated in the last Shatner-Trek film I think, where he and McCoy are sentenced for killing some Klingon guy. I don't know how they make the lips sync up to the translation, but hey, it is the future, anything is possible.

The main thing that you have to understand is that these things are movies and tv shows. If you are looking for realistic Sci-fi I suggest you type "Hard Science Fiction" into google. that type is all about realistic physcis and possible futures.

-ZERO MASS

Good point, dinosaur--there's a clear dividing-line (or should be) between sci-fi and fantasy. The moment you start introducing fantasy elements into a sci-fi story, most people find the transition uncomfortable enough to stop reading or watching. Not to say that there aren't fantastic elements in real life--there are some pretty weird stories out there which are unexplainable unless there are laws of Nature which we don't yet understand--but until we do understand them, and they become a normal part of scientific knowledge, it's better to steer clear of them in stories which involve "normal" science.

The last Star Fighter introduced a CPU chip that proved for instant translation of languages. A bit far fetched, but way better than Star Gate & Star Trek where everybody speaks modern English.
Even in the original Star Trek they had a device known as the Universal Translator. It was seldom mentioned because it was just taken for granted. Of course there were situations in the show where it seemed unlikely that they were using such a device, but this is television. You have an hour to tell your story (50 min if you account for commercials) . You can't afford to spend most of it in just everybody learning each others language.


Star Gate has a gate on each planet, delivered in the past by a star ship, and a worm hole while bordering on fantasy is not logically impossible. The Star Trek transporter is utter nonsense. The Fly teleporter at least had a transmitter and a receiver, but the Star Trek transporter is supposed to be able to beam you to a barren planet.
Again, the transporter was a device meant to get the story moving as quickly as possible. This, and the fact that for the first season of ST, there wasn't enough money in the budget for a shuttlecraft, and no guarantee that there ever would be. (Ever wonder why they didn't just send a shuttlecraft down to pick up the crew members stranded when the transporter went out in the Episode The Naked Time? They didn't have any yet!)
Another hokey theme in Star Trek was getting trapped in some holodeck virtual reality situation. The transporter could retrieve you from a planet 500 miles away, but it could not save you from the holodeck?
This one could have an explanation within the rules of the ST universe itself. Much of the Holodeck was based on transporter/replicator technology. It is just possible that the transporter beam would not be stable inside an enviroment where so much activity of the same nature was going on.)



Another of my pet peeves about TV shows and movies is the introduction of Scifi and/or fantasy in ordinary stories. I turn off any police or detective show when they introduce a psychic to help they solve the crime. I can enjoy a SciFi or fantasy story involving telepathy and/or or other paranormal concepts, but it bugs me when such concepts are introduced in reality-based stories.
Agreed.

BTW: I enjoy a lot of SCiFi which has technical flaws, but such flaws hurt otherwise entertaining stories and cause me to turn stop watching some stories which would hold my attention if they avoided the utter nonsense.

The upshot is that many of the technical flaws that you or I find annoying slip right by the average viewer and that is who the show is aimed for.

What bugs me more is when the whole premise of the show/movie is bogus. Take Waterworld for example, based on the world being completely flooded by the ice caps melting. If such an melting were to occur, the oceans would not raise enough to cover even a large fraction of the land.