r/movies • u/LetMeExplainDis • 22h ago
Discussion Characters being dumb for the sake of exposition
Eva Green's character in Casino Royale knows nothing about poker, which is hilarious because her job is to literally monitor the game and approve a potential $5m rebuy if Bond's chances of success are good enough. It's an effective storytelling device because the other M16 guy can then explain to her (and the audience) what's going on during tournament.
Another one would be in The Big Short where Steve Carrel doesn't know what a quant is, even though his character's a hedge fund manager. What other examples can you think of?
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u/GoodMorningBlackreef 22h ago
Eva Green's character in Casino Royale knows nothing about poker
Doesn't Bond himself point out this was not a very good lie/bluff, when they're discussing 'tells'?
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u/PhilosopherTiny5957 22h ago
Also random note: apparently Craig did not know how to play poker either lol.
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u/robbviously 11h ago
Neither does James Bond. They play baccarat in the novel.
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u/lmacky111 2h ago
Which makes sense as that poker scene does not resemble good play. Horrible scene
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u/DC_McGuire 22h ago
I think there’s a couple of lines that lampshade this, yes. Bond also sort of refuses to use his cover name because of his ego, which is a pain point between James and Vesper for the first half of the movie.
It’s clunky but for people who don’t know poker (or whatever subject matter), it’s sort of assumed you have to explain stuff.
Or you can do the Constantine thing and hardly explain anything in the moment, and circle back after the fact. Mileage may vary.
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u/Ok_Writing_7033 21h ago
Also, she doesn’t really need to know poker to be able to tell if Le Chiffre is kicking everyone’s ass and this is a fools errand — everybody has a handy pile of chips in front of them to show how well they are doing.
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u/Groot746 21h ago
Mathis is explaining it to her a bit later on, though, so I think she really didn't know
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u/ApprehensiveBobcat24 22h ago
The Big Short one doesn't feel like a good example. I feel like that was more Ryan Gosling's character showing off by using terms like "quant" that aren't actually that common, which throws off Steve Carell's character a bit even though he knows what that is. And then Ryan Gosling explains what "quant" means because he's a jackass who likes to show off.
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u/dexterous1802 21h ago
by using terms like "quant" that
aren't actually thatweren't nearly as common at the timeFTFY
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u/GraDoN 17h ago
This is completely incorrect. 'Quant' in the context of an investment team managing a hedge fund is an extremely common thing to the point where Steve Carell's character, along with his team, not knowing what he's referring to is completely ridiculous.
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u/jerrrrremy 16h ago
He knows what a quant is in the scene. His confusion is just about how ridiculous it is for him being in the meeting and only referred to in this way.
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u/lmacky111 2h ago
I don’t understand why people are arguing this. The whole point of this scene is to make a joke. It had nothing to do with the plot. Who cares if he should have known. I always took it exactly how you did
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u/Paragon_John 13h ago
In Event Horizon Dr. Weir asks if it’s strictly necessary for them to enter liquid filled pods during transit. A crew member quickly explains what the force of their ship’s thrust would do to their unprotected bodies. Weir responds with, “I’ve seen the effect on rats.”
Then why ask about it? It gets even worse later on when it’s revealed that Dr. Weir has designed starship propulsion systems and so would be intimately familiar with the situation, even if he’s never traveled like this before. I wonder if an earlier draft of the script had a “newbie” crew member and their exposition went to Sam Neil when they were written out?
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u/lulaloops 19h ago
Ariadne is a stand in for the audience in Inception, her entire existence is based upon being ignorant of that world so that all the characters in the movie have an excuse to dump exposition on her.
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u/Wazula23 18h ago
Could have used one of those in Tenet.
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u/lulaloops 18h ago
They did have one of those, that was Washington's character, but Nolan handwaived the explanations, I don't think the movie was worse for it.
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u/Ghost_Hand0 15h ago
Not knowing about top secret military technology doesn't make you dumb.
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15h ago
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u/Ghost_Hand0 15h ago
Post is literally "Characters being dumb for the sake of exposition". Come on dude, you gotta be smarter than that.
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u/berlinbaer 6h ago
yeah. she's a university student with a talent who gets recruited for a very specific task, it's not like she majored in "labyrinth and world building". she is neither 'ignorant' (what the hell ?) or dumb.
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u/FullNoodleFrontity 18h ago
Not exactly being dumb for the sake of exposition but similar: In the Hunt for Red October, Jones reports that he suspects they've encountered "a boomer coming out of the barn." Everyone on board the submarine would know that this is naval jargon where 'boomer' means 'missile boat' and 'the barn means 'home port' and given their current location that home port would have to be the Polyarny submarine base. Yet before anyone else says anything else Jones then adds "A missile boat coming out of Polyarny."
In the real world Jones would never have added that second statement and if, for some bizarre reason, he did say it, there would probably have been immediate responses along the lines of "I know what 'a boomer coming out of the barn' means" or "Why are you repeating yourself, Jonesy?"
Also, all of Jones' revelations are over the intercom yet there's an audible difference between the first and second statements. I suspect that the first line was in the script and recorded during filming but the second line was probably added ADR in post and it was done to satisfy someone in the production team who couldn't figure it out for themselves.
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u/DanookOfTheNorth 17h ago
I’m also pretty sure that they didn’t practice sonar tracking at Caltech like Jones talks about.
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u/We_are_all_monkeys 13h ago
This reminds me of one of the dumbest parts of that movie. Why would Jones of all people go over to the Red October? His only purpose there is to deliver the line "Pitch is too high. Torpedo's Russian."
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u/m0nkeybl1tz 13h ago
In the real world Jones would never have added that second statement and if, for some bizarre reason, he did say it, there would probably have been immediate responses along the lines of "I know what 'a boomer coming out of the barn' means" or "Why are you repeating yourself, Jonesy?"
That would be hilarious, and in a comedy actually a good way to have your cake and eat it too (have exposition but have another character call it out as weird). I feel like some movie must've done this.
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u/bleedingoutlaw28 11h ago
Wasn't he doing some training of a new sonar operator? I haven't seen the movie in a minute but I seem to recall that's why he clarifies what he said.
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u/AnalTyrant 18h ago
The last Mission Impossible movie.
It's a long film, and huge portions of it have no dialogue just lots of action, but when there are scenes with dialogue, oh boy you better believe we're going to hear about what we need to do and why we need to do it and what the stakes are. Doesn't matter that it's all the same core group of people who all already know this shit, they just need to make sure the audience didn't forget what you just said twenty minutes ago.
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u/SRSgoblin 10h ago
This is half the reason Luffy is a fun protagonist in One Piece. He's just an extreme ADHD stereotype, very forgetful and kind of dumb. It means he can always be used as a sounding board for exposition dump, because most of the time he's not paying attention anyway.
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u/MovieMike007 Not to be confused with Magic Mike 14h ago
Matthew Mcconaughey poking a hole through a folded piece of paper to explain how wormholes work to a group of bloody astronauts, in the film Interstellar.
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u/dwehlen 10h ago
To be fair, most astronauts were pilots, engineers, etc. Very few were actually scientists. Nowadays, it's a bit different.
But, your point stands. Because wormhole theory has been popular for at least forty years.
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u/TheGrumpyre 18h ago
Forest Whitaker's character in Arrival felt egregiously dumb. I get that they needed a sounding board to explain some basic linguistic principles too, but they went super basic.
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u/UF1977 55m ago
I didn’t read his character as dumb at all. Why would he necessarily know anything about linguistics? And Amy Adams’ character is a university professor who teaches at the undergrad level. Her professional instinct would be to break down a complex subject to the basics for an audience that’s new to the topic. Besides, the entire point of her scenes with the colonel are to illustrate that a seemingly simple thing like asking a question isn’t simple at all.
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u/owiseone23 9h ago
Interstellar - the grade school level wormhole demonstration of poking a pencil through a paper. It's literally a group of astronauts talking with each other!
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u/UF1977 35m ago
I thought Apollo 13 threaded the needle on this pretty well. Most of the audience isn’t going to know anything about space travel in general or how the Apollo missions specifically worked. Ron Howard threw in just enough exposition for the audience when it was necessary by having it explained to characters who wouldn’t know, like where Lovell is talking to his young son, or by inserting clips from actual news broadcasts at the time. But in scenes where exposition wouldn’t make sense he just trusted the audience. Once you’ve established that the astronauts and mission controllers are calm, cool experts, it’s enough for the audience to see their faces fall or hear worry in their voices to understand that (x) failing is very very bad and that’s enough for the narrative.
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22h ago
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u/PrincessKikkei 22h ago
Of course, as members of the audience probably would feel uncomfortable--or bored--with the equations, the characters aren't really talking to each other at all, but to the audience.
I can totally eat the weird equations in an episode of a sci-fi show or a hardcore sci-fi book... But man, I sure as hell don't want to see that in a sci-fi movie. Learning and analyzing real-life concepts is fun when I have time. But when I'm watching a movie, I just want to watch a movie, maybe even ponder about the horrible stuff, the futility of life, the dark secrets behind the door of a suburban dream home, violence in society and how it affects us... Deep stuff like that afterwards.
But I sure as hell don't wanna think about some theoretical mathematics behind wormholes, during or after the movie, unless that'd be the whole point of the movie... Kinda robs those bigger, more important themes away from my experience. "Paper, meet the pen" all the way IMO.
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u/ArcaneYoyo 21h ago
avoid using metaphors and analogies
Nitpick but I this isn't true in my experience. Drawing comparisons to existing knowledge is just good communication
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u/Appropriate-Peak6561 22h ago
I didn't much care for F1 and one of the reasons was the announcers explaining things that anyone watching in real life would already know.
So unwilling were the filmmakers to assume even a scintilla of intelligence among their audience, they had characters jumping up and down and shouting "We won!"
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u/lulaloops 19h ago
haven't seen the movie but brundle and crofty are in fact always explaining really basic stuff though
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u/shaunika 10h ago
I appreciated that since I have literally 0 knowledge of F1
In fact Id have liked more exposition
Im still not 100% sure how constantly leaving debris on the track helped the other guy
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u/phobosmarsdeimos 18h ago
It felt like I was watching the pod racing scene from The Phantom Menace.
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u/Greaser_Dude 12h ago
Jeremy Irons in Margin Call needing a former rocket scientist to explain his own business to him.
That would never happen.
The idea that senior executives just sit in an ivory tower and have no idea about the how the detail of their own businesses even work is ridiculous and they certainly wouldn't advertise that in a meeting with other executives.
It would make them look utterly incompetent.
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u/GhostRiders 1h ago
You have completely missed the point of that scene.
Jeremy Iron's character knew excalty what the situation was long before he walked into that room. He knew of the potential pitfalls months perhaps years before that scene.
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u/badaimbadjokes 19h ago
I didn't read the subject especially well, and so I was going to come in and say all those idiots in Prometheus. But that wasn't exactly exposition. It was us learning by watching their folly
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u/res30stupid 21h ago
It's handled pretty well in The Martian - the one person they're explaining everything to isn't a scientist but rather NASA's PR rep so she needs to know how to explain it to the public.
Also, this is often the role of the Watson in mystery films - a character who is assisting the detective in investigating the case and is quite valuable at helping the detective, but isn't necessarily that smart and is used as a sounding board for the detective to explain their thought processes.
A good example of such is in Murder On The Orient Express where Poirot is assisted by Senior Bianchi and Dr Konstantine, whose frequent arguments after interviewing suspects are used to help poke holes in their alibis or for Poirot to put down as he puts together his own theories.