Kablam

I love superhero movies. I love being able to, for a time, suspend disbelief and be present in a world where anything can happen. That being said I do appreciate when they make an effort to make things seem at plausible based on real-world physics, and tKhere are somethings that happen in these types of movies that bother me. I still enjoy them, and these are not movie-ruining, I’m just nitpicking.

**Potential Shazam spoilers below**

For example I watched Shazam today with the family. There’s one of those classic scenes where some form of public transportation, in this case a bus, is in peril and our hero needs to save it and everyone on it. The bus is falling off of a bridge and Shazam is on the ground below and stops the fall with his body. Yay! But how is him catching the bus any different than it hitting the ground. Even if he was doing some special technique to act like a shock absorber (which it doesn’t seem like he was even trying to do), he still would be stopping this freefalling bus in a matter of seconds over 5.5-6 feet. If that fall was going to kill the people on the bus without him there it should have at the very least injured them with the “catch” but they all walked off the bus virtually unharmed. Then again it has been a while since I have taken physics and perhaps this specific peeve is completely baseless, which I would be happy to hear.

I am not as annoyed or upset with this as my tone may seem to suggest. And some say thinking about such things in a superhero movie is stupid and pointless because there’s a bajillion other things that defy physics/ science/ explanation. But what I love about these movies is the idea that it could be possible, but without some of consistency with the basics of our reality, it becomes detached from it. Rather than supernatural characters and events occuring in a natural world, we simply would have supernatural characters and events occuring in a supernatural world, which can also be a lot of fun (Looney Tunes comes to mind), but it’s just different.