THE 355: Why do spy movies always do this quickly-hop-on-the-bus trick?

Edit: I've added spoiler tags, but the spoiler is just that two characters are alive in the final 2 seconds of the film. I'm not describing the ending of the story.

https://imgur.com/h9Nx5no

This is the final few seconds of The 355 starring Jessica Chastain. The movie is called that because it feels 355 minutes long. The character, whose name I can't remember even though I literally just finished watching it, is standing by the side of the road farewelling the Diane Kruger character with a hint of a smile that says "maybe there will be a sequel." (There won't).

A bus passes by. We see Chastain through the windows, then she's briefly obscured altogether. The bus passes and behold, Chastain is gone!

So how did she do it? Did she latch onto the outside of the bus like Spiderman? Did she wrangle her way into the bus? And how did she do it so quickly?

I took some screencaps to work out precisely (approximately) how quickly she did what I'm calling the "quickly-hop-on-the-bus trick," something you definitely shouldn't try at home or anywhere else.

There are 24 frames per second, so I just labelled them with the time followed by a frame number I allocated. The bus first appears as a white blur at 1:55:38 Frame 7. We last see the character through the bus windows a full second later at 1:55:39 Frame 7.

Chastain hasn't, at this point, moved a muscle. She hasn't lifted so much as a finger to grab onto the nearest handhold. She's saving all the action for the nanoseconds in which Diane Kruger will not be able to see her doing things.

By 1:55:38 Frame 16, it's apparent that Chastain is gone. There are no flailing limbs or flapping coat-tails visible, so we can assume she swiftly and successfully attached herself to a moving bus within 9 frames, or around 0.375 seconds.

Frankly I don't think a person could even bob down and pretend they'd pulled off the hop-on-the-bus trick in just over a third of a second. It takes longer than that to even drive over a person's foot, I've heard.

Why do directors keep expecting us to believe this is possible? And why did Chastain's character have to do this anyway? She could have simply walked away like all the other characters did. Presumably they then called Ubers or caught trains or hopped on buses the normal way, through the door.

Thank you for listening to my rant.

Submitted January 29, 2022 at 08:25PM by Webbie-Vanderquack https://bit.ly/3Hfuesd