Blessed by the Potato

I love CinemaSins, and when you watch a few episodes you start to pick up on the recurring jokes. One in particular is the Prometheus School of Running Away From Things, when a character runs in a straight line away from something instead of just ducking to the side, with that stupid scene in Prometheus being the ridiculous over-the-top example that gave the meme its name.

After seeing one movie sinned for that recently, I got to thinking that it’s not entirely fair: our flight responses evolved for perils (like wolves, dire rats, and frost spiders) that can turn in a chase, where moving at right angles just gets you eaten faster. So in some cases doing something like that can make sense from the character’s point of view — they shouldn’t do that for many inanimate movie perils, because physics, but it makes sense why they did anyway, because evolutionary psychology. And running at least with a vector component away from the thing does give you a bit more time to get out of the way, so running perpendicular might not be optimal, either.

So I started to write up a little blog post to explore the idea further, maybe do some math to find if there were cases where there was an optimum angle to run away from something, and started by stopping off at TV Tropes to see if they had a list of the times the Prometheus School of Running Away from things appeared. And wouldn’t you know it, they already made that point above (along with other examples like The Temple of Doom). So this is an invitation to just go ahead and get sucked into TV Tropes for a while because they have already covered this ground.