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

8. Enhance!

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.