[originally posted: 2/26/2017]
Concession of Palpability- accepting an unlikely but ultimately trivial detail for the furtherment of a story line:
For a movie to be confined within the span of two hours and for the full story to be completely and effectively told from beginning to end, the viewer must be willing to allow a certain amount of leniency in accepting that some events would happen the way they are depicted versus the reality of how it should.
For example, if the protagonist needs to break into a heavily guarded research facility or gain top-secret confidential information in order to progress into the heart of the story, the audience should overlook the extreme unlikelihood of that, knowing that it’s integral for the narrative to move forward but a waste of time to explain how it could actual happen.
Some movies misuse this concept by maintaining a rather realistic and plausible story line and instead, use a grandeous quixotic event to do nothing more than tie up loose ends as a means of providing the semblance of a conclusion.
Take into consideration a skilled and resourceful but an otherwise normal human hero who suddenly and without explanation develops super powers to destroy his enemies in the final fight scene. Or a film with no other supernatural references that wraps up by explaining everything as the result of alien intervention.
These scenarios that force the audience to choke on a desperate resolution are no longer concessions of palpability, but rather, stupidity to the extreme– the result of lazy writing and poorly thought out conceptualization.