Is it right to criticize scenes in movies for lack of realism?

Yeah. If Tauriel stabbed a troll and rode it into a tower to make a bridge, there would probably be fewer complaints because it'd just be her Crowning Moment Of Awesome. Legolas, however, has a long and storied history of just ignoring gravity and physics whenever he cares to, that causes things like the slow-mo collapsing bridge climb to be met with nothing but eyerolls and groans.

It became apparent a long time ago that Legolas is playing with all the cheat codes enabled, so when he does awesome things, they just don't feel awesome. Legolas could no-clip through the battle at this point and it would not be surprising.

edited 21st Jan '15 8:24:56 AM by TobiasDrake

That's a well thought out argument on believability Tobias but it doesn't hold up to the fact the Matrix is a fancy video game that kills you if you lose. People complaining about Neo's "unrealistic" scenes are completely missing the point, when it was clearly established he is playing with all cheat codes on.

Really, if you wanted to complain about "realism", ask why Neo, who is functionally a digital demigod, encounters all these programs with abilities he seems unable to duplicate. That implies that he can't do all things and that the system shouldn't have to basically rewrite itself to find a balance for him or indeed, why his supposed balance doesn't behave like a balance at all or remains in power even when Neo unplugs from the Matrix and thus no longer needs to be accounted for. Shouldn't a new program rise to balance Smith as soon as Neo is gone?

No, they complain that he can fight 100 guys at once with a street light or that he can catch his girlfriend in the same instance he overturns a car without crushing her, even though those are already covered by the established fact physics are basically what he tells them to be. He's the guy that doesn't have to dodge bullets if he decides he doesn't want any to hit him...

...good video though

Yeah, that's a problem that pops up any time your premise counteracts entertaining plot. Watching a guy play God and be capable of instantly hitting the I Win button? Not entertaining. Watching a guy with supped up powers fighting against the odds? Now we have a winner. Unfortunately, they made it clear that he really could rewrite reality, and shot themselves in the foot because of it.

I agree that complaining about Neo defying physics in the Matrix is silly. Complaining about him psychically shutting down the drones by using Neo powers in the real world in the second film, then shunting his consciousness into the Matrix without any connection to the system, however, is a valid complaint and makes no sense in-universe or out. Neo gets to carry his The One superpowers into the real world on a few different occasions despite this making absolutely no sense whatsoever, resulting in the ever-popular "Second Matrix" theory.

As for why Neo's cheat codes don't seem to be work as well as they should in the second and third films, the second one actually answers that: the machines wrote his cheat codes, so of course they only work the way the machines want them to. "Cheat codes" is a good analogy. The humans see Neo as the hacker in the game, able to warp the code however he wants, but he's actually just using a few extra access rights the programmers allowed him.

Pretty much playing in debug mode, then.

I suppose one thought that came to mind on this topic is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what the Willing Suspension of Disbelief actually is. It is not literary criticism but literary theory. In short, the burden of suspending disbelief is on the audience, not the artist. Certainly the goal of the artist is to make the audience believe in what is taking place, and failure is definitely a concern for the artist, but they don't "owe" the audience anything.