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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Obviously it didn't take place in either of those: the Death Star is not real, and the trench run was filmed in a (number of?) scale model sets.

That's an even more annoying answer, but I think it lets us pull a more interesting lesson out of this than a factoid which nerds are going to trump each other with: how "direction" in the filmmaking sense and "misdirection" in the magic sense are related. We see a series of shots from a variety of angles and follow the action from shot to shot - despite the shots not taking place at the same time or even necessarily the same place.

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Watch a movie car chase set in a city you know ! For example, the Ronin car chase in Paris jumps from street to street all over the region in an entirely nonsensical way - but a person who doesn't know Paris won't mind at all, and it does look very Parisian... The rest of us just has to suspend disbelief !

The Morse/Lewis/Endeavour programmes often show that sort of thing, with the characters walking through various scenic areas of central Oxford which aren't directly connected.

You're never more than a couple of corners away from the Covered Market in Oxford-land.

I recall the Covered Market becoming a bus station in one Endeavour episode.

I lived in a small town in Japan, and experienced this for a movie shot there. They would just bounce from downtown to the heights in a second!

Morse was usually pretty good for this, and fairly regularly had shots of not-that-pretty bits of Oxford. Certainly the earlier ones.

Lewis, however, regularly teleported significant distances in the pursuit of A Clue.

I'll have to revisit those episodes, which I've not seen for a while.

Bourne Identity 2. They start out on what looks like Palolem Beach in Goa, turn and walk off it into some bustling town nothing like the village there, before a few minutes later being embroiled in a car chase through somewhere looking more like Panaji.

Another example from the Bourne movie the takes place in Berlin: when he's on his way to Berlin he's not feeling well and has to pull over. But that scene was filmed in Berlin so I found it rather confusing when shortly after the scene he's still on his way and not there yet at all.

Maybe the exception that proves the rule: I always thought The Blues Brothers perfectly captured the feeling of driving around in Chicago.

Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago is miles long if you watch the right Batman movie.

I had an interesting experience with this for Michael Jackson's "Speed Demon" music video. I watched our copy of Moonwalker countless times, but watching the video as an adult, I recognized a number of streets and the freeway, and I realized they filmed the road sequences in Portland, OR (my home town). And it suddenly made sense, as the stop-animation in the music video came from Will Vinton studios, based in the Portland area.

My favorite, certainly because of personal connections, is when the car chase leaves Long Beach, CA to go to San Pedro on the Vincent Thomas Bridge. There's often a big dramatic thing with the toll booth, but the toll booth was on the Long Beach side, so you'd have to jump over it (or whatever) before you went over the bridge.

I believe the toll booths are gone now, the bridge has been toll free in both directions since 2000.

The Steve McQueen flick Bullitt w/ the car chase thru San Francisco[0] is a good example of a car chase skipping around (and one that goes thru locations people on HN may be personally familiar with).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq10zyhe6o0

The insights about psychology and misdirection are definitely fascinating, but I don't see why it's necessary to shoot one aspect down to appreciate the other: For me, both discussions are taking place on different "layers" of the movie: One is the story it's trying to tell and the universe it's building, the other is the technical/artistic realisation of that story. Both are interesting (and flawed) in their own right.

When discussing a novel, you wouldn't say "well actually, none of that is real, it's all just letters on paper, but the font is really nice", would you?

I think it's less "it's all just fiction so why do you care" and more that trying to analyze fiction by looking at contradictions or inaccuracies in world building is easy but fruitless.

I think the most interesting part of the article is that it basically criticizes the film for featuring a prominent geographical feature that kinda looks like a trench and having the big ending scene take place in a trench but making the two completely unrelated. This is an example of misdirection, which can be a useful tool in storytelling, but it doesn't do anything with it.

Others have commented about films being "flexible" with real-world urban geometry to better provide a visual narrative but I think the point is that considering these "mistakes" misses the point. It's not that, say, Paris looks like that, but in the context of the film it is certainly meant to feel like that.

Patrick H Willems made a (infamous?) video about the related topic of "plot holes" a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9HivyjAKlc While I disagree with the idea that plot holes never matter (arguably they can get in the way of suspension of disbelief and be a case of bad craftsmanship even if the art itself still ends up fine) he's right that trying to dissect a film through the lens of "logic" usually misses the point.

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