10 Ridiculous Movie Tropes So Common People Think They're Real

8. Enhance!

Blade Runner Enhance
Warner Bros.

The Trope

This is a hugely pervasive trope across not only crime movies but also serialised TV, where a character will find a way to "enhance" a blurry image to reveal greater clarity and provide further clues about their investigation, typically revealing a perp's face.

The trope is taken to surely its most absurd zenith in Blade Runner, where Deckard (Harrison Ford) uses state-of-the-art photo-analysis tech to glean laughably implausible details from Zhora's (Joanna Cassidy) picture.

Scott's film arguably just about gets away with it due to its sci-fi setting and the apparent self-awareness with which the prolonged scene conducts itself, but it's absolutely pushing it.

The Reality

Despite everyone having a camera and basic image editing tools in their pocket these days, many people still don't appreciate that an image can't magically reveal detail beyond its native resolution with a few magical clicks.

There are of course tools which can attempt to clean up an image and remove intrusive visual noise within a fairly narrow margin, but there's no world where such tech can reveal a supernatural level of added detail.

Thankfully the trope has been mocked widely enough in pop-culture that its use has declined significantly in recent years, but even so, many still take it for granted that a snapshot, no matter its resolution, is a boundless window into the past.

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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.