I love science fiction and fantasy, horror and thrillers, basically all types of speculative fiction. Yet I am very easily thrown off by impossibilities that do not seem to fit into the stated parameters of any fictional universe.

I guess I am too analytical about my flights of fancy: I like to know how the universe works. It can be a completely impossible universe according to the laws of physics as we know them, but it still has to have some sort of internal governance, and stick to it.

I'll believe water flows uphill if you show it happening all over the place as a normal everyday thing, for example.

But what gets me is lack of consistency in said universes.

A great example of this is the Indiana Jones movies. They had rather witty scripts and fun ideas. My HUB suspenders dealt just fine with the concept of there really being a holy grail, for example.

But what steamed my shorts was in the areas that were treated as normal to the world we live in:

In real life, there is no such thing as a sealed subterranean vault with billions of snakes in it. For one thing, they'd starve to death. For another, they'd run out of air. What would they eat? How would they have light?

Now I know that can be nit-picky, but the characters clearly stated that the tombs had been sealed for thousands of years; therefore the snakes could not exist within that framework.

Another good example along the same lines: in any sealed chamber that has no way to circulate air, the air goes bad over time. When opened, the chamber would violently expel all sorts of noxious gases, and would not be safe to enter until it had been thoroughly vented. Again, the movie showed that chambers were sealed and unopened for many centuries.

Thus, my Suspenders snapped.

Another example is from LOTR. Most of the movie I handled just fine, but one glaring error throws me out of the fictional world each and every time I watch "The Fellowship of the Ring." When Frodo wakes up in Rivendell there is a scene where he stands at a balcony overlooking the area. The balcony is at his waist.

But he's a hobbit. And the room and bed and everything else about where he was, was elf-sized. What elf would want a knee-high balcony?

If there were indications that the room he stayed in was hobbit-sized, I would have accepted the balcony. But since there were none, my Suspenders snapped again.

So I have to disagree with you on that one.

I don't recall a single case of a hermetically sealed chamber in the entire Indiana Jones trilogy. I don't think that the words "hermetically sealed" are even used at all.

Snakes in a desert eat at night (mostly) then crawl back down into some nice, dark, inaccessable chamber or other to digest their meal slowly over a period of several days/weeks before eating again. So there is a small inaccuracy in the fact that Salah sees the floor moving...most of the snakes would just be lying about rather than moving (of course, once they started dropping lit torches down there the snakes would become a bit more active).

Also, Jones squirts some flammible liquid on a bunch of snakes and lights them on fire, but we never see any burnt, dead looking snakes. I guess those particular snakes were simply vaporized.

The air didn't whoosh either, it came out in sort of a spooky moan (presumably of supernatural origin, this being the "Well of Souls", after all).

Okay, so I have a bit of a...um, a metaphysical plausibility issue with that one, but at least it was consistent with the way supernatural forces and events were portrayed in the rest of the movie.

Edit: according to IMDB.org, Lucas wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and Spielberg directed it, so I wasn't entirely wrong.

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I liked The Postman a lot better than Waterworld because I think it did a better job of showing how the world came to be in its current state. I don't know as I liked the ending much, it just seemed like it moved too quickly. But I suppose since it took me more than two hours to lose my disbelief, and then for only five or so minutes, I can still say I like the movie

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I'm also a fan of Waterworld. Postman wasn't as good--as a movie. It was great as a novel. I couldn't put it down. Though I do question how people can have that many horses, in the movie or book (for some reason, I recall it being more of a problem in movie for me). I can't imagine many survived the disaster in the first place.