I don't understand why movies (and TV shows) seem to enjoy setting up situations so wildly inconsistent that no matter how hard you try to suspend disbelief, the script just keeps beating you over the head with incongruities.
Intangible people are one of my pet peeves, because it shouldn't be that hard to do them right, but they so often suck, badly. Usually intangible people physics is as follows:
- Intangible people pass through other people, walls, objects they would like to pick up, etc.
- Intangible people can walk/run on the ground, fall onto the ground and have it break their fall, slide into walls and be stopped, take stairs and elevators, and ride in moving vehicles.
- Intangible people can both sit in chairs, and walk through them.
As a side note, 2 leads to the interesting question: could you trap someone by putting them in a really big bowl, with sides that gradually sloped up to near-vertical? If not, at what angle exactly would they be able to pass through the bowl?
But basically, intangible people only perceive things as solid when it's convenient for the purposes of blocking the scene, which is just a huge cop-out. Sure, there's the argument that it looks like the floor is solid and they are walking on it only because that's how the person is used to thinking of themselves moving. But they aren't used to thinking of themselves walking through walls, and yet they manage that just fine. My favorite scene to illustrate this type of painfully jarring inconsistency: in Ghost, the dead guy makes a running leap through the wall of a subway car, lands hard on the floor of the subway, then takes a minute to regain his balance, being rocked around by the motion of the subway. Huh? A very close second is when he is thrown across a subway car, slides through the (closed) door so that he is between cars, then stops sliding because he hits the door into the next car. Again, what the heck? For the believers of the self-perception theory mentioned above I challenge you to explain how, while sliding backward, he is deciding which doors/walls it makes sense for him to slide through.
I say, if you want ghosts or out-of-phase Star Trek characters or whatever, make a reasonably self-consistent system (like, they float around by thinking) and spring for a few more special effects so you can pull it off. I can suspend disbelief, but I can't suspend my observations about gargantuan inconsistencies in the way the world (even a fantasy world) works any more than those poor babies that researchers made cry by making blocks and puppets disobey the laws of physics.
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