10 Most Out Of Place Scenes In Sci-Fi Movie History
Star Wars, Avengers, The Matrix - why did they have to go and include THAT?
Transcript
00:00 From superheroes to deep space sagas, there are few places in the universe that science fiction cinema hasn't taken us.
00:07 But sometimes even our favourite films take us places we didn't necessarily want to go.
00:12 We can be watching along, happy as Larry Fishman, before a sudden shift in tone, plot, quality or character takes us out of things completely.
00:21 I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are the 10 most out of place scenes in sci-fi movie history.
00:27 Number 10. America gets torn in two.
00:30 Chappie. Longtime Blomkamp collaborator, Charlton Copley, voices the titular character.
00:37 A decommissioned enforcement robot and the first true AI, who falls in love with Di Antwood of all people.
00:44 Reluctantly turning to a life of crime on the streets of Johannesburg.
00:48 On this journey, America, one of Chappie's teachers and co-conspirators, teaches the young robot to wear bling,
00:55 walk with an attitude and put people to sleep.
00:59 At least until the third act, that is, when Hugh Grant's villainous engineer, Vincent Moore, stomps him using his remote-controlled moose robot.
01:08 In a sequence better suited to a Saw movie than this edgy yet frequently happy-go-lucky Genesis story,
01:14 the moose grips America with a robot claw and tears him in half before splattering his torso on the building behind.
01:22 Little in the film up until this point prepares you for such a grim and sudden death of a supporting character.
01:28 Tonally, it doesn't match any of the action, emotion or visuals surrounding it and it leaves the audience reeling.
01:35 The end of Chappie may bring the wholesomeness around again, but there's no denying how out of place this moment is.
01:42 Number 9. Techno Diva Dance. The Fifth Element.
01:45 23rd century NYC cabbie Corbin Dallas teams up with Leeloo, the embodiment of the sacred Fifth Element,
01:53 to keep an ancient planet-eating cosmic force from destroying the world. Calamity ensues.
01:59 While the film features many wild and wacky digressions, none are stranger than the space opera sequence.
02:05 Corbin and Leeloo follow a quest for some sacred stones - just go with it - to a blue diva called Plava Laguna.
02:12 But before they can reclaim it, they - and we - are forced to sit through an excruciating few minutes of space opera.
02:19 Techno music kicks in, the diva throws some shapes and the audience cringe from behind their fingers.
02:26 The scene is awkward, uncomfortable and seriously out of place, which is saying a lot for a film with Chris Tucker's loud,
02:33 flamboyant intergalactic talk show host going down on air hostess during takeoff.
02:38 8. Tri-Breasted Prostitute - Total Recall (1990)
02:43 Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Douglas Quaid, a construction worker whose memory-implant fantasy of being a secret agent on a mission to Mars
02:51 seems to be coming true, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
02:56 Along the way he encounters many wonders of a technologically advanced, yet persistently unequal society.
03:03 But perhaps none more striking than a triple-breasted mutant prostitute.
03:07 Played by Lysia Naff, the futuristic lady of the night is offered up to Arnie by her pimp,
03:13 and she opens her blouse to show him the goods, laughing like Janice from Friends.
03:18 Now far be it for us to poo-poo a bit of space nudity, but this scene feels shoehorned into the film.
03:23 Unless there's a deeper, more artistic element at play that we're missing somehow?
03:28 Unfortunately, no, I don't think so.
03:30 This film establishes a pattern for the film where most female characters are presented as sexualised objects,
03:36 ostracised freaks, or both.
03:38 Naff came to regret taking the part as it left her feeling overexposed and deeply unsexy.
03:44 And it isn't difficult to see why.
03:47 Number 7. Elvis Shrine - Robocop 2
03:50 Peter Weller returns to the streets of a dystopian Detroit as Alex Murphy,
03:55 the eponymous Robocop, taking on crime buff Kane and his designer, drug-pushing Nuke Cult.
04:02 While also attempting to prevent psychologist Dr Juliet Fax from creating another Robocop using a death row inmate.
04:10 While pursuing Kane, Robocop tracks his gang to a warehouse,
04:13 where he uncovers the skeleton of one Elvis A. Presley in a glass case.
04:19 That's right, the Nuke Cult have the remains of the King of Rock and Roll in their lair,
04:24 alongside pictures of Mother Teresa,
04:26 and deleted scenes reveal that they worship him as some kind of a god.
04:31 Amusing though this is, the scene doesn't make any sense.
04:34 How did they get him? And why Elvis? We may never know.
04:38 Number 6. Jazz-dancing emo Peter - Spider-Man 3
04:42 Sam Raimi may be back in the superhero fold with Multiverse of Madness,
04:47 but let's not forget the film that got him kicked out in the first place, Spider-Man 3.
04:52 Despite the film's inability to control its characters and narrative flow,
04:56 it manages its tone fairly well.
04:58 At least until Peter Parker gets infected by the Venom symbiote and things go... a little odd.
05:05 He's so bad, in fact, he's going to dance in the street like your dad at a wedding.
05:09 Buying a black suit and dancing on the pavement,
05:12 taking his girlfriend to a jazz club and dancing on the tables,
05:15 and generally dancing his way into our worst Spidey-related nightmares.
05:20 Peter goes full cringe in a sequence that is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.
05:24 Sure, this is Raimi's humour down to a T, but goddammit Sam, there's a time and a place.
05:30 Did this scene sound the death knell for the series? That's not for us to say.
05:35 But what we can say is that Raimi was planning on making a fourth film and,
05:39 well, that was 15 years and two additional Spider-Men ago.
05:42 Number 5. Macaroni-cheese cheddar goblin - Mandy
05:47 Cage plays Red Miller, a lumber worker whose girlfriend Mandy is kidnapped and killed by a religious cult,
05:53 and who therefore must enact a campaign of brutal vengeance.
05:57 It's the 80s, the world has an ominous neon glow and pretty much anything goes,
06:02 whether that be chainsaw duels, coke-snorting demon bikers,
06:05 or a green goblin that projectile vomits macaroni cheese.
06:09 Trust me, this movie's really good though.
06:11 The creepy little green guy appears on television during a tense and crucial
06:15 point in Red's emotional journey, treating two children to some macaroni cheddar.
06:21 The scene is undeniably brilliant, but it comes at a strange time,
06:25 right after Red has watched his beloved burn to death in front of him
06:29 and bears little resemblance to the rest of the film.
06:31 But no matter how out of place he is, cheddar goblin will always have a seat at our table.
06:36 Number 4. Shoe-horned Joker - The Batman
06:40 Taking us back to Batman's early days, Robert Pattinson plays an unrefined junior bat who
06:46 has lots of unresolved parent-based angst and only half a utility belt to help deal with it.
06:51 As his opposite, Paul Dano is the Riddler, a genius in cell with a chaotic plan to raise Gotham.
06:58 Needless to say, Batman puts him in Arkham and throws away the key,
07:02 but in one of the film's most jarring sequences,
07:05 Riddler plays whispers with the inmate in the cell next door,
07:08 Barry Cogan's wonky-toothed yokel Joker.
07:12 The deleted scene of Batman meeting Joker goes a long way to explaining why
07:16 the Riddler-Joker scene exists in the first place, but the very fact that they didn't include the
07:21 former should have seen the impetus needed to nix the clown prince of crimes inclusion altogether.
07:27 As it stands, the scene feels shoe-horned in,
07:30 serving no purpose other than to tease lucrative sequel bait.
07:34 Worse than that, though, it actually robs the Riddler of some of his mystique and has
07:38 him playing subservient second fiddle to a character who isn't even in the film.
07:43 Number 3. Girl Power - Avengers Endgame
07:46 Avengers Endgame brought the Infinity Saga to a definitive close in 2019,
07:51 bringing the entire roster of MC heroes back to our screens to defeat Thanos.
07:55 While the Earth's mightiest heroes triumphed,
07:58 the film also delivered with many characters we'd spent the previous decade growing to love,
08:03 including the original female Avenger, Black Widow.
08:07 Thankfully, unlike a decade ago, there are plenty more well-developed female heroes to
08:11 fill her shoes, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the film's final battle against Thanos.
08:17 Unfortunately, the best and brightest at Disney and Marvel got together and decided the only way
08:22 to showcase this was to have all the major female characters to assemble in a row in the midst of
08:27 battle, trading lines to a swell of inspirational music. Host note here, I actually love this scene,
08:34 but let's keep going. What's intended to be a badass female-affirming scene comes off as
08:40 the cheesiest, hammiest, most manufactured moment the MCU films have ever brought us.
08:45 And that's saying a lot, considering some of them rely almost solely on
08:48 cheese, gloss and soap opera drama to pad their run time.
08:52 Number 2. Zion Orgy Rave - The Matrix Reloaded
08:56 The re-emergence of The Matrix has, of late, sent many of us down memory lane,
09:01 revisiting 1999's stone-cold sci-fi classic and its sequels. After some initial wall-running
09:07 and gunslinging to sate fans' thirst for shiny leather action, the free people of Zion gather
09:13 in an underground cavern so MC Morpheus can kick off the biggest rave the world has ever seen.
09:19 Probably. Thus ensues a mass of bodies bumping and grinding to some dirty beats,
09:25 intercut with Neo and Trinity getting jiggy with it.
09:28 The scene might better belong to train-spotting or human traffic,
09:32 feeling at odds with the tone and broader content of The Matrix films.
09:36 What possessed the Wachowskis to include this goes beyond rational understanding.
09:40 Perhaps on too many red pills.
09:42 Number 1. Flying Space Layer - Star Wars The Last Jedi
09:46 Star Wars The Last Jedi, or Episode VIII, depending on what neck of the woods you hail from,
09:52 enraged some longtime fans upon release and pleased plenty of others, with director
09:57 Rian Johnson and actor Kelly Marie Tran unfairly catching most of the flack.
10:01 After Sith apprentice Kylo Ren launches an attack on his mother, Leia Organa's ship,
10:06 Leia is blown out into space in a fireball of debris. So she's a goner, right? Wrong.
10:13 After surviving for a good minute or so in the vacuum of space, her hand twitches,
10:18 her eyes flick open, and she, um, force-flies herself to safety.
10:24 The power, the action, and the scene don't jive with anything in the Star Wars universe.
10:29 Neither the lore, the canon, nor even the fundamental laws of chemistry, biology, or physics.
10:34 We discovered in The Rise of Skywalker that Leia trained as a Jedi under Luke,
10:38 and even has her own lightsaber. But this doesn't help land the whole space-flying thing any better.
10:44 If they could just zoom around the freezing cold void like Superman,
10:48 why didn't Luke or Obi-Wan just zoom up to the Death Star's exhaust port with a
10:52 thermal detonator suppository? That's the end of our list, but let me know down in that comment
10:56 box what you think are the most out of place scenes in sci-fi movie history.
11:02 As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture, thank you so much for hanging out with me.
11:06 If you like it, you can come say hi to me on my Twitter account, where I'm @JessMcDonald,
11:11 but make sure you stay tuned to us here for plenty more great lists.