Two Things
In movies and television, there have always been two things that bother me.
First, no anonymous character ever has good aim. I just watched a scene in a television show where five people burst into a room with machine guns and trained their guns onto a single character. The character they were aiming at stood there for like four seconds. He was a stationary target. There were five guns aimed at him. Did he die? No. Did he get hit? No.
It kind of ruins suspense in a scene. If characters can’t be ever brought down by anonymous guards or soldiers, then the suspense is completely removed from battle scenes. Sure, it is more dramatic of a fight if a major character does the killing, but it can be taken way too far. A scene with five machine guns and one target with nobody dying is taking it too far.
Second, nobody ever checks for a pulse. A character may die and then another character will start grieving for that character. They’re all, “No. [he/she] isn’t dead! [He/She]’s not dead!” and someone else always has to persuade the other grieving character that the dead one is dead and that they need to keep moving. Why don’t these people ever check for a pulse? There are only a few very rare cases where a lack of pulse will lie, and these scenes in movies usually aren’t that kind.
Yet, no one ever checks for a pulse. It always breaks frame for me and kills the willing suspension of disbelief.
Movies should stop doing these things. They’re either cliched, frame-breaking, or stupid. If any filmmaker thinks that these kinds of practices should be continued, they’re insane and unsuited to the job of filmmaker.