10 Annoying Movie Tropes You Can't Un-See
3. "Enhance!"
In the world of film, every black and white pixelated CCTV feed is secretly 4K.
Usually accompanied by zooms, freezes, image shifts and 'algorithms', the enhance feature is central to unlocking the extra capabilities of not just CCTV feeds, but flip phone videos, 240p images and fire-damaged photographs from The Blitz.
A magical button or sequence of keyboard taps allows gumshoes, CSIs, Starfleet captains and the average Joe to zoom and enhance any image from any source, leading to the all-important plot-saving clue.
This trope has allowed an unholy cavalcade of improbable story developments in its time, sharpening up reflections of faces in the windows of faraway buildings, making even the most distant of number-plates completely legible and rendering easily identifiable mugshots from a square millimetre of grainy footage.
The enhance trope has been so overused that it has recently found new life as a sort of second-order, self-referential, meta trope, with certain films calling out the cliché and highlighting the fact that, no matter how hard you scream at the monitor, black and white security footage cannot be 'enhanced'.