The most popular action movie trope that surprisingly never goes wrong
zero hour metaphor – noun: an action movie in which the protagonist is faced with a looming deadline and is forced to perform perfect actions in a split second.
Author: Robert Skuch Published
We need to talk about the zero hour metaphor because I refuse to believe that every little thing goes right all the time. If you’re wondering what the “zero hour” trope is, it’s that the clock is ticking in an action movie and the hero only has so much time to cut the right wires, rescue the girl, and make a perfect jump out of the window as the structure behind them is engulfed in flames. Almost every action movie uses this setup and somehow doesn’t have any problems.
Except for movies like this blue ruinsWhere real-world rules are allowed to exist, complete disaster is less common when a hero does everything right, because that would be a complete bummer. but when it Do It happened, and it was refreshing. That’s just how the world works, and our action heroes are occasionally humiliated.
Let’s talk about Patch Tuesday
I started thinking about all the things that could go wrong with the “zero hour” metaphor during the breakdown of the workday. Microsoft is notorious for its Patch Tuesday updates, which are released on the second Tuesday of each month. I’m very picky when it comes to routine maintenance and I need my computer not to be running a lot of updates during peak hours so that I can complete tasks on time. Tuesday’s patch update doesn’t matter. It comes when it wants, but it always ruins my life a little bit.
I try to run updates during off-peak hours, and when they drop during the day and I know I can save bandwidth, I just let them run so I don’t get ambushed later. But here’s the thing: these updates can become a bottleneck for the entire system unless you comply. They take about an hour, but sometimes your computer locks up so bad you have to press ctrl + shift + escape to get into task manager and start force closing everything.
This past Patch Tuesday update, I’m lined up to host a podcast and hope to get updates sooner rather than later. It wasn’t launched until an hour before the show, and then it took two It took hours to complete, my personal zero hour metaphorical hell. During the show, everything froze, the production derailed, and ended up being delayed by three hours. I can’t open task manager. I can’t troubleshoot. I was hijacked by Tuesday’s patch update and had to rearrange my entire evening around it.
Why do I equate the Zero Hour trope with Patch Tuesday updates? Because my job and extracurricular activities are low risk, and routine security updates still manage to ruin my day. I did everything the right way but everything still goes wrong. So, when an action hero needs to hit a kill switch to prevent a nuclear warhead from being launched, what happens if that device is powered by servers that are connected together by decades-old legacy software and an unmanageable user interface? Bet you didn’t think of that.
Space Force understands the struggle
Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich) space force Knows exactly what I’m talking about, and I’m glad the show actually played the Zero Hour trope straight and let one minor inconvenience ruin everything. When Dr. Chen Kaifang (Miriam Yeung) is ordered to visit a satellite to help intercept an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, he is caught off guard by an automatic Windows update that takes 49 minutes to complete. The problem is that the impact will happen 11 minutes later. Dr. Mallory screams “F*** MICROSOFT!” as the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance and Update refuses to cooperate. Staff were forced to improvise everything manually.
This is what the Zero Hour metaphor should always have been. Reality is full of stupid obstacles. It doesn’t matter whether the stakes are an asteroid or another patch update on Tuesday. Something annoying will always find a way to creep into the mix.
Flares and flags save the world again…
The most infuriating thing about the Zero Hour trope is how convenient everything is. have a look rock or White House Down. Both films rely on the exact same scene and ending, with Nicolas Cage’s Dr. Stanley Goodspeed and Joey King’s Emily Carr waving flares and flags seconds before fighter jets are about to blow the White House and Alcatraz off the map. Fighter pilots are busy doing fighter pilot things. What happens if they don’t see the signal? With so many moving parts, problems are bound to arise in this situation.
1994 speed is another perfect example. Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) has until noon to defuse the bomb and collect the ransom for Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper). But if Payne manually detonated the bomb in the middle of the day, or if the bus was traveling less than 50 mph, would that eliminate his influence? He needs the hostage alive. A bombed bus takes ransom off the table. Sorry, boss.
This spiral is brought to you by Microsoft
Until the Zero Hour metaphor gets a bit of a realist treatment, I’ll continue to use it as an excuse to complain about Microsoft. I don’t hate this metaphor, contrary to what you may think. All I know is that life never goes that smoothly. The next time your computer locks up, consider the impact if you were a spy, a hacker, or operating a submarine running outdated software that suddenly decided to launch a forced update seconds before an incoming missile attack.
